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Dear Readers,
Today, the boundary is shifting on two fronts: AI not only thinks faster, it is gaining hands and feet. A general reasoning system has achieved gold level at the Informatics Olympiad, while humanoids are moving from demo cages to production lines and stores. At the same time, the gap between simulation and the factory floor is shrinking: standardized sim-to-real pipelines are making virtual training part of the production routine. In short, the lab is becoming infrastructure—and the pace is picking up. Are you ready for code to meet the body? In this issue, we show how the IOI achievement was accomplished without special competition training and what it means for software development; we take you to the World Robot Conference 2025 and see how China is scaling humanoids; we visit Beijing's “robot mall” as a litmus test for real willingness to pay; and we explain why NVIDIA's Isaac Sim/Lab (GA) radically shortens the path from data set to policy – plus the graphic of the day, news bits, and a fresh Valley dispute. Read on and secure your head start.
In Today’s Issue:
OpenAI just won a gold medal in a top programming competition with a general-purpose AI
Get a first look at the World Robot Conference, where humanoids are taking center stage
A new robot mall in Beijing is bringing everything from chess partners to Einstein replicas to the public
NVIDIA's new simulation tools are making it easier than ever to build and test "Physical AI”
And more AI goodness…
All the best,


OpenAI wins gold at the International Olympiad in Informatics
The Takeaway
👉 Generalization trumps specialization: OpenAI's success with a general reasoning system instead of specialized programming AI shows that broad AI approaches may be more sustainable and versatile than task-specific solutions.
👉 Exponential growth in AI capabilities: The jump from the 49th to the 98th percentile within just one year signals an acceleration in AI development that could exceed previous forecasts.
👉 New benchmark standards needed: Rapid development is rendering traditional benchmarking systems obsolete – the community must develop new evaluation standards that can keep pace with the rapid evolution of AI.
👉 Paradigm shift in software development: With AI systems surpassing elite programmers, we are facing fundamental changes in the way software is developed, tested, and optimized.
The next breakthrough at OpenAI: An AI solves the most complex programming tasks in just five hours, beating 325 of 330 elite human programmers from over 100 countries – welcome to the new reality of machine learning!

OpenAI won a gold medal at the 2025 International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), ranking sixth among all participants and first among AI systems. What's impressive is that the reasoning system used was not specifically trained for programming competitions, but is a general approach. Like a Swiss Army knife of AI, it can handle a wide variety of mental tasks, from mathematical proofs to creative problem solving.
4/n This result demonstrates a huge improvement over @OpenAI’s attempt at IOI last year where we finished just shy of a bronze medal with a significantly more handcrafted test-time strategy. We’ve gone from 49th percentile to 98th percentile at the IOI in just one year!
— #Sheryl Hsu (#@SherylHsu02)
6:00 PM • Aug 11, 2025
What makes this achievement so revolutionary for our community? In 2024, OpenAI only reached the 49th percentile at the IOI, but in 2025, the system jumped to the 98th percentile – a quantum leap in just one year! This rapid development shows that we may be closer to the threshold of true algorithmic creativity than we thought.
Could this be the moment when AI systems begin to not only write code, but truly understand it and use it creatively?
We officially entered the 2025 International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) online competition track and adhered to the same restrictions as the human contestants, including submissions and time limits.
The IOI is the world’s top programming competition for pre-college students —
— #OpenAI (#@OpenAI)
6:11 PM • Aug 11, 2025
Why it matters: These successes demonstrate that general AI models can outperform specialized, hand-optimized systems. The ability to solve complex programming problems without specific training points to a fundamental breakthrough in AI development that redefines the boundaries between human and machine problem-solving capabilities.
Sources:
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In The News
AI Brings Doodles to Life
Google Developer Expert Nitin Tiwari has released a new project that uses the Veo 3 AI model to transform simple doodles into incredible animated videos, showcasing how anyone can bring their sketches to life.
GLM-4.5 Now Has Vision
The GLM-4.5 model on chat.z.ai now features comprehensive vision capabilities, allowing users to analyze images and videos, with a specialized 'GLM-4.5V' model available for advanced visual reasoning.
New Open-Source Vision Model
A new open-source visual reasoning model, GLM-4.5V, has been released, achieving state-of-the-art performance across 41 benchmarks with its powerful 106B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts architecture.
Graph of the Day

World Robot Conference 2025: Humanoids in series production
In Beijing, over 50 manufacturers are presenting the largest humanoid show to date, focusing on “smarter robots, more intelligent embodied agents.” On display: more mobile manipulation, realistic demos, and clear commercialization roadmaps. This underscores China's ambition to scale humanoid systems industrially, supported by strong political and industrial backing.
Robot Mall in Beijing: Humanoids in retail
A new “4S” robotics store (sales, service, spare parts, surveys) sells and maintains consumer and humanoid robots – from chess partners to Einstein replicas, costing from hundreds to millions of yuan. The concept tests real willingness to pay and brings robotics out of the lab and factory and into everyday life – a marker for the beginning of consumerization.
Isaac Sim 5.0 & Isaac Lab 2.2: GA accelerates “Physical AI”
NVIDIA makes Isaac Sim 5.0 and Isaac Lab 2.2 generally available: Parts are open-sourced, new OpenUSD robot schemas and more realistic sensor/friction models reduce the Sim2Real gap. NuRec builds sim scenes from images; MobilityGen, Replicator Writer, and VLM captioning scale synthetic data. Unified ROS 2 interfaces and cloud access via Brev accelerate iteration. The result: faster, standardized pipelines from data set to policy evaluation – with visible industry adoption.

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Question of the Day
New ChatGPT or old? Which do you prefer?
Quote of the Day

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Rumours, Leaks, and Dustups
This is a remarkable claim given what I have heard alleged that Elon does to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn't like.
— #Sam Altman (#@sama)
2:31 AM • Aug 12, 2025
Sam Altman and Elon Musk are arguing—this time, Sam seems to be very angry personally.