[DigitalToday reporter Seulgi Son] AI science startup Asteromorph said on Aug. 31 that its AI model scored 28.6 out of 30 in the theory exam at the 56th International Physics Olympiad (IPhO 2026) held in July.

The International Physics Olympiad is an international physics competition attended by national teams of high school students. This year's event was held in Bucaramanga, Colombia.

Asteromorph's AI model took the theory exam locally on July 8, solving the problems for 5 hours in the same time window as actual participants. The company said the submitted answers were evaluated by the International Physics Olympiad's official grading panel and received a score equivalent to a gold medal, earning an official diploma and medal.

Meta Superintelligence Labs and Huawei, among others, also joined the on-site AI evaluation alongside Asteromorph.

The AI system used in the exam was built by combining multiple open-source large language models (LLMs) with in-house models and components, and it used Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure.

During the test, it carried out the entire process from problem input to interpretation, reasoning, verification and final answer generation without external AI model application programming interfaces (APIs), internet searches or human intervention, the company explained.

It also applied multimodal technology to process formulas, figures and graphs included in the actual test paper.

An Asteromorph official said, "We confirmed that it is possible to solve high-difficulty physics problems using only open-source models and our self-built AI system," adding, "System capability to design and operate complex reasoning processes is important, as well as the LLM's own performance."