Artificial intelligence is moving quickly. So is the generation of students learning how to build with it.
SOTA, short for “state of the art,” is a student-led AI community built around one of the newest international competitions dedicated to artificial intelligence: the International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence (IOAI).
Its members use SOTA to prepare for IOAI and national AI olympiads, work through hundreds of competition problems, follow a structured learning guide, track their progress, and learn alongside other students from around the world.
The platform behind that community runs on Cloudzy.
For SOTA, Cloudzy provides the production infrastructure that brings its learning resources, member accounts, database, website, and community tooling together in one place. For Cloudzy, it is another example of the kind of work a VPS can support when the people building it are focused on something much bigger than the server itself.
From Olympiad Competitors to Community Builders
SOTA was created by students who saw a problem in the way AI olympiad preparation was being approached.
Resources existed, but they were scattered. Some were aimed at complete beginners. Others assumed the kind of advanced mathematics and technical background that many school students had not yet developed.
SOTA set out to create a more direct path.
Its free IOAI Guide brings material together in a structured curriculum. Its AI Checklist collects around 410 problems from national olympiads in roughly 24 countries, regional contests, and IOAI itself, along with supporting material. Students can save their progress through member accounts, while the SOTA community provides a place for students and mentors to exchange resources, opportunities, and advice.
The result is already reaching students well beyond SOTA's original group. The community has grown to more than 650 students on its Discord server, with the Guide continuing to expand and the Checklist growing alongside it.
The SOTA Team
SOTA was founded by a team of competitive students and olympiad medalists, with Roumak Das as a member of its founding team and one of the core students behind its educational resources.
He represented India at the International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence in 2025 and earned a gold medal.
That competition experience shows up directly in the resources SOTA builds for its community.
Roumak is among the authors of SOTA's current IOAI Guide, where he contributes material covering topics such as classical machine learning, model evaluation, hyperparameter tuning, deep learning, and PyTorch.
Because the people creating the material are active participants in the same competition their students are preparing for, the Guide skips unnecessary fluff and focuses on what students actually face in high-stakes problem-solving. That is what makes SOTA different from a conventional collection of online study resources.
How Cloudzy and SOTA Connected
Cloudzy first crossed paths with the team through our IOAI 2026 initiative, which awarded infrastructure credits to olympiad medalists.
During that outreach, we noticed what the team was building behind the scenes: a serious, growing platform designed to lower the barrier to entry for students everywhere.
Recognizing the community value of the project, Cloudzy stepped in to sponsor their ongoing infrastructure needs so the team could consolidate their scattered tools onto a reliable, unified production environment.
Building SOTA on Cloudzy
To get SOTA off the ground, the student team needed a real server.
Cloudzy became that foundation.
The setup brings SOTA's core services together on a single Cloudzy VPS running Ubuntu 24.04. Caddy handles HTTPS and reverse proxying. PocketBase handles member authentication and saved progress. The server also runs SOTA's web frontends, IOAI Guide, Checklist, member accounts, and Discord community tooling. Deployments are managed through GitHub, with PocketBase running as a systemd service.
Before Cloudzy, SOTA did not have a dedicated production VPS running the full Guide, Checklist, and accounts stack together. Cloudzy gave the team a practical way to bring those pieces onto one server.
That simplicity helps a student-led project a lot. The team can spend their time writing educational material, curating competition problems, and building their community instead of wrestling with disconnected hosting.
Infrastructure That Stays Out of the Way
For SOTA, good hosting is something students should barely have to think about.
The team reports that the sites and member logins have remained stable under its community load. Day-to-day maintenance consists of GitHub-based deployments, Caddy configuration changes, PocketBase service management, and basic health checks covering uptime, memory, disk space, and service status.
Roumak Das, a member of SOTA's founding team, describes Cloudzy's role this way:
“Cloudzy has been our all-in-one solution for hosting SOTA's website, database, and Discord bots. Setup was simple, and it's been a steady base for the community while we grow the IOAI Guide and Checklist.”
Cloudzy sponsors SOTA. Roumak Das was offered free Cloudzy credits as an IOAI 2026 medalist.
Supporting the Students Who Come Next
SOTA is still at an early stage.
Its Guide currently focuses on general and bronze-level material and is expanding toward silver-level content. Its Checklist continues to grow as students and contributors add more problems and resources. As the community grows, SOTA expects its infrastructure needs to grow too, including additional RAM and storage and off-server backups.
That growth reflects what SOTA is trying to build.
IOAI itself is a young competition. It was first held in 2024 and has continued to grow since then. SOTA's own IOAI Guide notes that 108 countries and territories took part in the 2026 edition.
Communities like SOTA are helping build the ecosystem around that new generation of competition. Students who once needed to search across dozens of sources can now find structured lessons, olympiad problems, progress tracking, and a community of peers in one place.
And they can build it themselves.
Cloudzy's role is to provide the infrastructure underneath that work: a VPS that gives a student-led team the resources, control, and flexibility to turn an idea into a working platform.
SOTA is built by students preparing for one of the world's newest AI olympiads.
It is now helping the students who come next prepare for it too.
To learn more about how Cloudzy supports AI builders, student communities, and developer projects, visit our Business Program or Education Program pages.
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