Advancing physical reasoning in open models.
AIPhO challenges the open-source community to build open-weight models that can reason through hard, original physics problems, with a prize pool of over $250,000.
Our mission
AIPhO exists to advance physical reasoning in open models.
The strongest reasoning systems today are developed inside a small number of companies and their training methods are rarely made public. This leaves researchers dependent on these companies for capabilities they cannot examine or extend.
We want progress in physics reasoning to be open by default. Our goal is to produce a wave of open models trained specifically for physics reasoning, with weights and methods released for the scientific community to learn and build on.
Progress also needs a test that holds up. Our problems are written from scratch, reviewed by physicists, and kept private until the competition, so no model has seen them before.
The competition
Teams train and fine-tune open-weight models, then submit them through Kaggle to be evaluated on a set of 100 original problems. Every team works within the same compute budget, and prize winners publish their weights, code and methods, so winning solutions can be reproduced by any group.
The competition is open to anyone: companies, university labs, independent researchers and students.
The competition launches on Kaggle in April 2027. Exact dates and full rules will be announced soon.
Why a new olympiad
Olympiad problems are an established measure of physical reasoning. Each presents a brief setup without guidance, and each requires a solution that cannot be obtained by recognizing a familiar form. Their limitation is scope: every existing competition is confined to the secondary school syllabus, and current models have largely attained that standard.
AIPhO retains the format and removes the syllabus. Problems extend into graduate-level physics and the methods of current research. Each problem is evaluated against a panel of current frontier and open models prior to acceptance, and only problems that the majority fail are retained. Problems written to this standard remain unsolved by frontier models, and open models solve fewer still. Closing that gap is the purpose of the competition.
More on olympiads and where models stand
The International Physics Olympiad
Since 1967, the International Physics Olympiad (IPhO) has been the most prestigious physics competition for secondary school students. Each country sends at most five students selected through national competition; in 2025 they came from 85 nations. Over two days, contestants sit a five-hour experimental examination and a five-hour theoretical examination of three problems. Roughly one in twelve receives a gold medal.
Where models stand
In 2025, P1 became the first open-weight model to reach gold-medal performance on IPhO 2025. IPhO is the best-known physics olympiad but not the most difficult. Its problems begin from established physics and guide the solver through it. At IPhO 2024, one problem was built on Nobel Prize-winning work on laser cooling, and its author described decomposing it step by step for students. The guidance that assists a student assists a model equally, and the underlying physics is well represented in the literature on which models are trained.
Harder contests
The European Physics Olympiad (EuPhO) provides brief problem statements and leaves the entire approach to the contestant. Physics Cup releases one problem per month; in 2018, one problem went five weeks without a correct submission. At the Online Physics Olympiad (OPhO), organized by our team, nearly 700 teams competed over three days in 2026. No team fully solved Problem 22, and 166 teams were disqualified for the use of AI.
The ceiling
Some of these problems remain unsolved by any model, but frontier models solve more each year, and open-weight models lag behind. The deeper limit is the syllabus. EuPhO’s statutes require that no skills beyond the IPhO syllabus be needed, and Physics Cup operates within the same bounds. A test with a fixed ceiling will eventually be reached.
Who we are
AIPhO’s team includes the organizers of the Online Physics Olympiad, which has brought together more than 10,000 competitors from over 80 countries across six years. They’re joined by active researchers, PhD students, and international olympiad medalists, coaches and problem writers.
AIPhO is an independent project modeled on the AI Mathematical Olympiad, whose team advises us.
Get involved
Sponsor the competition
We're growing the prize pool to bring in more researchers and strengthen the open-source community.
Write problems
We're hiring physicists who can write original problems that current state-of-the-art models cannot solve.
Compete
Registration opens on Kaggle when the competition launches in April 2027.