[birktj]

To a certain extent I agree. But as far as I know I cannot go to chatgpt.com and paste the newest ICPC problems and get full solutions. And there is no information about what they do differently. For a competition like the ICPC, which is academic in its nature, I think it is very unfortunate to setup a seperate AI track like this without publishing clear public information about what that actually entails. And have clear requirements for these AI companies to publish their methology. I know it is a nice source of sponsorships for them, but the ICPC should afford to stand up a bit for academic integrity.

Without any of this I can't even know for sure if there was any human intervention. I don't really think so, but as I mentioned the financial pressure to perform well is extreme so I can totally see that happening. Maybe ICPC did have some oversight, but please write a bit about it then.

If you assume no human intervention then all of this is of course irrelevant if you only care about the capabilities that exist. But still the implications of a general model performing at this level vs something more like a chess model trained specifically on competitive programming are of course different, even if the gap may close in the future. And how much compute/power was used, are we talking hundreds of kWhs? And does that just means larger models than normally or intelligent bruteforcing through a huge solutionspace? If so, then it is not clear how much they will be able to scale down the compute usage while keeping the performance at the same level

[baq]

If you assume the brain is a computer (why wouldn't it be is my stance), we have a long ways to go in the optimization department, both in hardware and in software. If it's possible to do at all using hundreds of kilowatt-hours of electricity, no reason it shouldn't be possible within a few hundred Wh (which is a scary prospect, I agree, with consequences hard to imagine when realized.)

[GolfPopper]

Mechanical Turking, in the original sense of the word.