By Moon Chung
Publication Date: 2025-12-05 18:00:00
NVIDIA researchers on Friday won a key Kaggle competition many in the field treat as a real-time pulse check on humanity’s progress toward artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Ivan Sorokin and Jean-Francois Puget, two members of the Kaggle Grandmasters of NVIDIA (KGMoN), came in first on the Kaggle ARC Prize 2025 public leaderboard with a 27.64% score by building a solution evaluated on the same dataset behind the ARC-AGI-2 benchmark.
The team, which called itself NVARC, fine-tuned a 4B model variant that outperformed far larger, more expensive models on the same benchmark at just 20 cents per task. It showcased not only state-of-the-art results, but a breakthrough in scalable, economical AGI-style reasoning.
The ARC-AGI benchmark measures how well AI systems perform abstract reasoning and then generalize from very few examples using grid-based visual puzzles. ARC-AGI-2 is a harder, updated version that removes overlap with public training data. It is explicitly designed to resist shortcuts and brute-force memorization, making it a sharper test of true systematic abstraction.
The ARC-AGI benchmark has become one of the most closely watched indicators of real progress toward general reasoning in AI. Unlike typical machine learning benchmarks, ARC-AGI tasks can’t be solved through scale, memorization, or pattern scraping. Each puzzle is a tiny grid with only a handful of examples, forcing systems to infer abstract rules—and apply them to a brand-new…
