In 2014, at the Red Cross 2014 competition, Collin Burns set a North American continental record of 5.93 seconds for solving the 3×3×3 Rubik's cube, and he beat the world champion at the time, Feliks Zemdegs, in the US Nationals 2014 speedcubing competition.^[2,1] On April 25, 2015, at age 15, Burns set the world record for the fastest 3×3×3 Rubik's Cube single solve with a time of 5.25 seconds at the Doylestown Spring competition held at Central Bucks West High School in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, using a YuXin brand 3×3×3 cube.^[5,6,13,14] Burns solved the cube 0.3 seconds faster than the previous world record of 5.55 seconds set by Mats Valk.^[8,13,14] In a video a few months later, he explained that he uses the CFOP method.^[15] His world record lasted approximately seven months until being broken on November 21, 2015, by Lucas Etter with a time of 4.90 seconds, after which it was beaten several times, reaching 4.22 seconds set by Feliks Zemdegs in May 2018.^[9]

Burns is now a researcher in the field of AI alignment.^[11] In 2020, a team of researchers, including Dan Hendrycks and Burns, developed the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark to assess large-language models.