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SOTA Is All You Need

Everything for Your AI Journey, from First Model to Olympiad

Founding team · [email protected]

Abstract

We propose a new community, SOTA, based solely on curiosity, dispensing with applications and prerequisites entirely. It is student-led, built for students preparing for the International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence (IOAI), and open to anyone who wants to learn AI. Our 500+ members, from high school and college, meet on Discord [1] for guest sessions and learn alongside IOAI medalists. We are also writing a free study guide to the IOAI syllabus [2], keep a checklist of 400+ tasks from 30+ AI olympiads with English translations [3], and have run multiple contests.

Keywords: IOAI preparation, machine learning, past olympiad tasks, guest speakers, mentorship

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1Introduction

In machine learning papers, the best result so far is called the state of the art. It is the number printed in bold:

SOTA=arg maxmscore(m) (1)

We named our community after it. The title of this page borrows from Attention Is All You Need [4], the paper that introduced the Transformer: a single mechanism, attention, replaced the recurrence and convolutions that sequence models had relied on. SOTA applies the same idea to olympiad preparation, with one place instead of many.

The IOAI is a young olympiad, first held in 2024, and material for it is scattered across repositories, papers and courses. At SOTA you learn each topic in the IOAI Guide [2], practice on past tasks in the Checklist [3], and get help from mentors and guest speakers on Discord [1]. Whether you are writing your first model or aiming for a medal, everything you need for the journey is here.

2What we do

2.1Guest speakers

Sessions on Discord with guest speakers, specialists from different parts of the AI industry.

2.2Olympiad preparation

The IOAI Guide [2], a study guide to the syllabus that members are still writing; the Checklist [3] of past olympiad tasks to practice on; training sessions run by past olympiad qualifiers; and our contests (Appendix B).

2.3Mentorship

Guidance from students who have competed at IOAI, whether you are stuck on a bug or deciding what to learn next.

2.4Projects and news

Help and guidance for anyone building their own AI project, and news about the latest competitions and research, shared on Discord.

3How to join

There is no application. The whole procedure is Algorithm 1.

Algorithm 1 Joining SOTA
Require: curiosity about AI, any experience level
Ensure: you are part of the community
  1. join the Discord server [1]
  2. say hello and tell us what you want to learn
  3. while there is a guest session, project or mock contest do
  4. show up, ask questions, help someone else
  5. end while
  6. return something you built and are proud of

Our team

Aarav Vishal Sharma
Aarav Vishal Sharma
Roumak Das
Roumak Das
Savyasachi Singh
Savyasachi Singh
Rayan Banerjee
Rayan Banerjee
Figure 1: The founding team of SOTA. Follow the community on LinkedIn [5].
Meet the whole team →

References

  1. [1]SOTA Discord server. discord.gg/RAk9r2JtzC
  2. [2]SOTA IOAI Guide. Work in progress, written by members. guide.sota-ai.org
  3. [3]SOTA AI Olympiad Problem Checklist. Tasks from the IOAI and from national and regional AI olympiads, with English translations and progress tracking. checklist.sota-ai.org
  4. [4]A. Vaswani, N. Shazeer, N. Parmar et al. Attention Is All You Need. NIPS 2017. arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762
  5. [5]SOTA – AI Community on LinkedIn. linkedin.com/company/sota-community
  6. [6]Contact the founding team. [email protected]

AFrequently asked questions

A.1Is SOTA part of the official IOAI?

No. SOTA is an independent student community and is not affiliated with the IOAI. We follow its official syllabus and the tasks it publishes.

A.2Who can join?

Anyone interested in AI, whatever your experience level. SOTA is built mainly for IOAI aspirants, and many of our members are college students.

A.3Is SOTA free?

Yes. The Discord server, the sessions, mentorship, the IOAI Guide, the Checklist and our contests are all free.

A.4Do I need to know programming?

No. You can start from zero: the IOAI Guide begins with setting up Python [2], and mentors on Discord can help with the first steps.

A.5How do I prepare for AI olympiads?

Start with the IOAI Guide [2], which follows the official syllabus topic by topic. Then practice on past tasks from the IOAI and national AI olympiads in the Checklist [3], which keeps track of what you have solved, and join the training sessions run by past olympiad qualifiers. Mentors are on Discord.

A.6Can I contribute to SOTA?

Yes. You can volunteer, create content such as modules for the IOAI Guide, help organize events or become a mentor. Say so on Discord or email us.

BPast contests

Table 1: Some of the contests SOTA has run, newest first.
ContestRanTracks
December ContestDec 2025 – Jan 2026Classical ML, NLP, computer vision
October ContestOct 2025 – Nov 2025Classical ML, NLP, computer vision