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Public story · 2026-07-20 · high
Zitian Gao's team says the 20B model used no external tools, and a 6B version competed too, per the arXiv paper.
Why now: As of the July 20, 2026 coverage, no outside lab has weighed in on Loopie's scores yet.
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.
Each link below shares sources, entities, or timing with this story.
Hugging Face released transformers / Shared entity: Transformers / Earlier coverage
Linked by a graph relationship (Hugging Face released transformers); both cover Transformers; earlier Transformers coverage from 2026-07-09.
Shared entity: Transformers / Same source domain / Earlier coverage / Downstream implication
Both cover Transformers; reported by the same outlet (arxiv.org); earlier Transformers coverage from 2026-06-23.
Hugging Face released transformers / Same source domain
Linked by a graph relationship (Hugging Face released transformers); reported by the same outlet (arxiv.org).
Shared entity: Transformers / Same source domain / Earlier coverage
Both cover Transformers; reported by the same outlet (arxiv.org); earlier Transformers coverage from 2026-06-02.
Same source domain / Shared topic / Tension
Reported by the same outlet (arxiv.org); overlapping topics (attack, becom); pushes against this story (but).
Reported by the same outlet (arxiv.org); overlapping topics (attack, tool); pushes against this story (against).
Reported by the same outlet (arxiv.org); overlapping topics (attack, tool); pushes against this story (against).
Reported by the same outlet (arxiv.org); overlapping topics (attack, becom); pushes against this story (but).