NVIDIA’s Nemotron-3-Ultra-CC outscores every human at IOI 2026
Result confirmed
The takeaway
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.
Status
- Claim
Result confirmed
- Our reporting
- Medium confidence
- Verification
- Expert-checked
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 AstraAfter its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5After its cutoff
- Gemini 4 HydrogenAfter its cutoff
- Grok 4.7After its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it: it happened after all their cutoffs.
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
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.
Sources
4 sources from 4 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
4 sources: 3 primary, 1 press
Primary
- NVIDIA AI on X: IOI 2026 resultx.com, official
- Post-Training Language Models for Gold-Medal Performance in Coding Competitions (arXiv 2609.02849)arxiv.org, paper
- IOI 2026 statisticsstats.ioinformatics.org, docs
Press
- AI Weekly: Nvidia’s 550B Nemotron beats top human coder at IOI 2026aiweekly.co, press
Changes
- Filed