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. Every team works within the same compute budget, so winning solutions can be reproduced by any group.
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, written from scratch so they appear in no training data.
Problems range from international olympiad style to the level of active research, and are written by IPhO and EuPhO gold medalists alongside physicists from MIT, Oxford, UIUC, the University of Toronto and other universities. The competition is open to anyone: companies, university labs, independent researchers and students.
The competition launches on Kaggle in early 2027. Exact dates and full rules will be announced soon.
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 early 2027.