NVIDIA's Nemotron-3-Ultra-CC outscores every human at IOI 2026 (535.4/600)
NVIDIA reported that its fine-tuned Nemotron-3-Ultra-CC (550B total / 55B active MoE) scored 535.4 of 600 on the IOI 2026 problem set, graded by the IOI team. The top human scored 498.27, making it the first AI claimed to beat the best human contestant at the IOI. The model ran unofficially, offline, under contest limits.
Key facts
- Score 535.4/600 vs top human 498.27; human gold cutoff 361.12
- Nemotron-3-Ultra-CC: 550B total, 55B active parameters; also a 30B Nano-CC variant
- Trained with SFT and RL on ~22,000 curated competitive-programming problems (arXiv 2609.02849)
- Unofficial participation in Uzbekistan with no internet access and the same time and submission limits
- Context: at IOI 2025, OpenAI's system scored 533.29 and placed 6th among humans
Science result
- Field
- computer-science / competitive programming / algorithms
- Problem
- International Olympiad in Informatics 2026 problems
- Result
- Highest score of any participant, human or AI, on the IOI 2026 problem set.
- AI system
- Nemotron-3-Ultra-CC
- Human role
- Autonomous during contest
- Verification
- Graded by the IOI team per NVIDIA; unofficial entry
- Status
- confirmed
What happened
NVIDIA's post-trained open model family competed alongside IOI 2026 under supervision and beat every human's score.
Why it matters
Top-human performance in olympiad programming, previously only approached by closed frontier models, came from NVIDIA's Nemotron family rather than from a chatbot-focused frontier lab.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
Related posts (2)
- NVIDIA AI NVIDIA AI @NVIDIAAI · x · 2026-09-05
Cited as a source by: 2026-09-02-nvidia-nemotron-ioi-2026 - NVIDIA: Nemotron 3 Ultra graded 30/42 by the IMO team at IMO 2026 NVIDIA AI @NVIDIAAI · x · 2026-07-21
An officially graded open-weights data point from IMO 2026: NVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Ultra scored 30/42 under contest conditions with no tools.
Related events
- AI reaches gold-medal level at the ICPC World Finals ★★★★
- AI systems score a perfect 42/42 at IMO 2026, officially graded ★★★★★
Sources (4)
- officialNVIDIA AI on X: IOI 2026 result
- paperPost-Training Language Models for Gold-Medal Performance in Coding Competitions (arXiv 2609.02849)
- pressAI Weekly: Nvidia's 550B Nemotron beats top human coder at IOI 2026
- docsIOI 2026 statistics
id: 2026-09-02-nvidia-nemotron-ioi-2026 · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline