20B Looped Transformer Wins IMO and Physics Olympiad Gold

Loopie, a 20B looped MoE Transformer, scored gold medal marks at the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad and Physics Olympiad with no external tools. The claim comes from an arXiv paper by Zitian Gao and colleagues.

That result cuts against the standard argument against looped Transformers: given more compute, multiplying parameters is supposed to beat looping the same network. If Loopie's scores hold up, recursion becomes a real alternative to parameter scaling, and gold-medal reasoning stops requiring a model too large to self-host. That's the stakes for anyone who can't afford frontier-scale compute: real reasoning power without needing a datacenter.

The paper also reports a 6B version of Loopie, though it doesn't break out how that smaller variant scored on each competition individually.

This is one paper from one team, claiming gold medals on two of the hardest reasoning tests that exist, in the same release. An outside run against the same 2025 problem sets is what turns this from a claim into a result.