News

Jimmy Yamazaki (the national team’s head coach) on preparing for IOAI:

Since the end of June, the schedule has been very packed, with almost no chance for proper rest: we started with the first training camp, where the team was formed and the participants worked on Team Selection contests. Then came a week and a half break, followed immediately by EUROAI (where our residents performed excellently), and now, after just another week, we are at the second training camp.

The participants who passed all the selection rounds and reached the Team Selection stage are real monsters and are making strong progress in learning data science. Since the first camp, we have worked through a huge number of problems and covered various topics, from classical linear regression to the finer points of modern transformer design. The full breadth of this knowledge is essential for choosing the right tools to solve olympiad problems, where the key constraints are the number, quality, and speed of testable hypotheses. I really hope the participants’ hard work pays off, and I am immensely grateful to all the coaches who shared their expertise with them.

IOAI 2026 kicks off on August 2, and this year Kazakhstan is not just taking part—it is hosting the event. DSML is actively involved in the IOAI international and host committees, but today we want to thank those at DSML who are directly preparing Kazakhstan’s champions.

As a reminder, the National AI Olympiad took place in April. This year, the technical organization and task set were handled by long-standing members of our community: Jimmy Yamazaki and Daniil Orel (who also authored tasks last year).

After the national olympiad, the first training camp was held to form the main team. The team then competed at EUROAI, followed by a second camp and intensive preparation for IOAI.

The team’s main coaches are Jimmy Yamazaki and Aibek Bekbayev, a long-time DSML resident better known as Kona. Daniil Orel and Assel Yermekova also joined the coaching team; she coached the national team last year as well.

On behalf of DSML, we want to thank them for their contribution to the development of the olympiad movement!

Today marks one year of DSML Young, thanks to our tireless Yeraly Gainulla!

DSML Young is our community of young people who have been learning machine learning and AI since school! Together, they take courses, work on joint projects, discuss, prepare for and take part in AI Olympiads and Kaggle competitions under the DSML.KZ banner.

In one year, they posted 17k messages in the community, held 4 online events, and even had a paper published at ACL 2026 as part of the research competition they won at the SemEval Workshop.

We wish our young residents even more victories and hope DSML Young continues to grow, welcoming more people who want to develop in this field. And, of course, good luck to our members, as many of them will be competing at IOAI 2026 next week!

You can start your journey with DSML Young by filling out your profile on our website

Kazakhstan wins 4 medals

The EUROAI Olympiad is being held for the first time this year in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Kazakhstan’s four-member team competed remotely. Kazakhstan won 1 gold, 2 silver, and 1 bronze medal! You’ve already heard the winners’ names more than once on dsml.

• Gold: Әбу Қанабек, Almaty/Konaev
• Silver: Исламнур Хусаинов, Taraz
• Silver: Даужан Бекетов, Almaty
• Bronze: Cултанби Исатай, Karaganda

The team shared their impressions of the Olympiad with us. They noted that participants had no access to LLMs, which made the competition an especially interesting challenge. Unlike last year’s IOAI, the European Olympiad used small datasets and models, allowing participants to test solutions faster.

Congratulations to our champions! We wish them even more victories and success!