IOAI — the International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence — is an annual competition where national teams of secondary-school students spend a week solving machine-learning, computer-vision, and language-AI problems, earning individual medals much like long-established science olympiads in mathematics or informatics. The difference is the subject: AI itself.

What IOAI Is

IOAI held its first edition in Burgas, Bulgaria, in August 2024, organized by the LERAI Foundation together with an international board of educators and AI researchers drawn from dozens of countries. It is open to secondary-education students under 20; each participating country or territory may send up to two teams of four students plus a team leader.

The competition has grown fast. The 2024 edition drew around 40 teams; 2025 moved to Beijing; the 2026 edition runs August 2–8 in Astana, Kazakhstan, with teams from over 100 countries. IOAI 2027 is set for Singapore.

How the Competition Works

IOAI is really three contests in one:

  • The Individual Contest decides the medals. Over two on-site days of six hours each, students work alone at separate computers on tasks spanning machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision. Roughly the top half of participants earn medals, split gold, silver, and bronze in a 1:2:3 ratio, and the top three scorers receive trophies.
  • The Team Challenge asks each country’s team to collaborate on a single applied project. The task changes every year — the 2024 edition centered on AI image and video generation, 2025 on programming a robot.
  • The GAITE Contest is a simplified, hint-assisted version of the individual round, designed to give students from countries new to the olympiad circuit a lower-pressure entry point.

Before competing, every team signs an “Oath of the Teams” committing to honest, ethical use of AI tools during the contest — a nod to the fact that, unlike a math olympiad, the subject matter itself raises questions about how AI should be used responsibly.

Who Gets There, and How

Countries don’t send whoever applies — they run their own national selection process months in advance, typically built around a training course that teaches the syllabus: applied machine learning, data science, and AI ethics. Students who want to see exactly what’s tested can consult IOAI’s own public syllabus and resource hub, which publishes past problem sets, solutions, and links to free courses used by national teams to prepare.

Why It Matters

IOAI is best understood as an early-stage talent pipeline. Established olympiads in mathematics, physics, and informatics have long fed their strongest performers into top universities and research careers; several IOI alumni, for instance, now work at leading AI labs. IOAI applies the same model directly to AI and machine learning, at a moment when governments and companies are competing openly for AI talent. For participating countries, fielding a team is as much about building a domestic pipeline of AI-literate graduates as it is about winning medals.

Why It Matters for Georgia

Georgia is sending an eight-student team — effectively two full squads — to IOAI 2026 in Astana. The students were selected and trained by the Georgian Artificial Intelligence Association (GAIA), a nonprofit focused on growing the country’s AI sector, through an eight-month “Olympiad AI Course” covering machine learning, data science, and applied AI. TBC Bank financed the trip as part of a broader push to fund science and technology education in Georgia, and the national selection process was run jointly with Business and Technology University’s Tech Olympiads Hub. It’s a concrete, if small-scale, example of Georgia investing directly in the same AI-talent pipeline that IOAI was built to cultivate.

In the News

See our report on Georgia’s national team heading to IOAI 2026 in Kazakhstan for the roster, the training program, and how the team was selected.

FAQ

Do you need to already be an AI expert to compete? No. IOAI expects strong math and programming fundamentals plus several months of focused preparation — it isn’t aimed only at students who already work with AI professionally, and the GAITE track exists specifically to ease in newer countries.

How is IOAI different from general competitive-programming olympiads? Those competitions test algorithmic problem-solving broadly. IOAI is narrower and applied: every task involves building or evaluating actual machine-learning, computer-vision, or language-AI systems.

Can university students compete? No — IOAI is restricted to secondary-education students under 20.

Where and when is the next IOAI? IOAI 2026 runs August 2–8 in Astana, Kazakhstan; IOAI 2027 is scheduled for Singapore.

Sources: International Olympiad in AI — official site and Wikipedia.