The first Malaysian AI Olympiad (MAIO) was held on March 14, 2025 (Pi day!), open to all students studying in Malaysia under the age of 20 irregardless of nationality. Students had 48 hours to solve a wide range of AI problems ranging from simple to challenging. The top 40 students were then invited to join the Malaysian IOAI Training and Selection Programme which ran for one semester.

After close to four months worth of lectures, labs, and two rounds of selection tests, the Top 4 scorers in the final selection test are then invited to represent the nation at IOAI 2025. Attached is the a team picture from the first briefing for the Malaysian national team, as well as key visuals from problems used in MAIO 2025 season (could you guess what they were about?).

The Malaysian AI Olympiad programme serves to educate through delight, and aspires to continuously produce small but elegant AI problems. Our students this year worked on problems such as building a rudimentary pedestrian detector from scratch using plain Pytorch, pitting AI agents against each other in a game of Liar’s Dice, and finetuning small language models. In addition, we hope to host complete editorials of test problems used in this 2025 season at a later date.

Stay tuned on https://aiolympiad.my, and looking forward to meet you at IOAI Beijing this year!