The returned winners of the AI Olympiad were welcomed in Moscow

Russian schoolchildren who became the absolute champions of the International Olympiad on Artificial Intelligence (IOAI-2026) were welcomed in Moscow. The Russian national team has been ranked first in the team competition for the third year in a row. Footage from the meeting of the winners on August 8 is published by Izvestia.

The competitions were held in Astana from August 2 to August 7. Russian schoolchildren won eight medals — seven gold and one bronze.

Artyom Gorokhov, Mikhail Vershinin, Yelisey Kirpichenko, Kirill Labzin, Alexander Povarov, Nikita Pudovkin and Semyon Rodionov received gold medals. Alexey Kolegov became the bronze medalist. Gorokhov also became the absolute winner of the individual competition.

465 schoolchildren from 105 countries participated in the IOAI-2026 final. The Russian national team was ahead of the Chinese and Polish teams, which took second and third places, respectively.

Nikita Pudovkin noted that over the past year, the capabilities of AI assistants have expanded significantly, including in the field of programming. According to him, this is reflected in the level of tasks of the international Olympiad.

"Over the past year, various AI assistants that allow you to write code have developed a lot. And because of this, a person can do a lot more. This is reflected in the Olympics. The tasks become more complex, where you need to write even more code, implement some impossible ideas. But the time remains the same," said the winner of IOAI-2026.

According to Pudovkin, the preparation for the competition continued for a long time and the result was important to them.

"I was sure that the medal would be, but what color? After the first day, it became more understandable, because you felt the other participants. And it was necessary to aim for gold," he added.

Alexander Gushchin, the head coach of the Russian national team at IOAI-2026, said that the participants went through several selection stages and trained with the coaching staff for two months.

"Any Olympics means the more effort you put in, the better the result. The guys went through many stages of selection. They trained with our coaching staff for two months," Guschin said.

He also noted that the Olympic field in the field of artificial intelligence is planned to be further developed.

This year, the number of participants in the Olympiad has increased by 64% compared to last year. The competition consisted of two individual rounds lasting six hours each. Participants solved tasks related to audio, robots, semantic search, computer vision, and the identification of texts created by neural networks.

Experts from the Central University and the Alliance in the field of Artificial Intelligence were involved in the preparation of the Russian national team.

On August 7, the Russian national school team became the absolute champion at the International Artificial Intelligence Olympiad for the third year in a row. The final of the competition consisted of two individual rounds, each lasting six hours. On the first day, students solved audio tasks, robot control, and semantic word search. The second round included the implementation of adversarial attacks on computer vision models, the development of algorithms for detecting texts created by neural networks, and the generation of various variations of the Olympiad logo.