Such contests seem to be just a fun way to get students interested in algorithmics. Many of those who become passionate about Computer Science due to competitive programming go on to get PhD in CS and contribute with their research. Some highlights among Code Jam winners: Tiancheng Lou (won Code Jam in 2008 and 2009, went on to earn his PhD from Tsinghua University in 2012, currently start-up co-founder and CTO), Marek Cygan (won Code Jam in 2005, earned his PhD from University of Warsaw in 2012, currently start-up co-founder and CTO), Gennady Korotkevich (won Code Jam 8 times between 2014-2022, as of 2019 was a PhD student at ITMO University) (sources: Wikipedia and Linkedin)

The first two have published some influential works during their academic careers:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=df8TSy4AAAAJ

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Vjo4Tg4AAAAJ

I wonder what the total number of research papers and citations of all Code Jam winners would be. Sadly, it's hard to find reliable info on most of them.

There is no correlation between a person's ability to solve such problems and his ability to do research.

AoC tasks are much easier than usual Competitive Programming tasks. AoC is pretty much undergraduate class level (whereas some Competitive Programming problems ended up being turned into actual papers) and the main difficulty in tasks is in implementing the solution rather than coming up with a tricky idea. Also, in AoC time complexity doesn't matter at all - all you need is any solution. Classic Competitive Programming problems have both a memory and a time limit. Most of them have a simple brute force solution but the trick is finding an efficient algorithm.

However, I can see Google execs thinking the same and using this explanation as the reason to close the competition.

Internships? There are some people who spent every summer in college as Google interns

L4 at Google is basically “mid level” aka you’ve proven yourself past a college hire but you’re not a senior engineer with lots of experience.

So doing a few jobs as an L4 is what’s unexpected because after experience at another role, and additional knowledge gained, etc ideally they’d be able to return as L5+.

I know a competitive programmer who actually has been to Code Jam finals. He says ChatGPT wouldn't be able to solve the majority of tasks that are used in algorithmic competitions like Code Jam. ChatGPT might be able to do some of the simplest tasks, but Code Jam had a few rounds of increasing difficulty and at some point it wouldn't help much. The last round is actually in-person so there would be no influence of ChatGPT there at all (Edit: correction, the final round used to be in person, but it has moved online since Covid)

Also, even if people do use ChatGPT, that shouldn't be a problem - it's a tool like any other. Programmers use tools all the time. Is it cheating if someone uses Wolfram Alpha or Stack Overflow to solve a programming task at hand?

Maybe Google's Bard does better at this type of task.