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OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

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Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#41

These are high school level only in the sense of assumed background knowledge, they are extremely difficult. Professional mathematicians would not get this level of performance, unless they have a background in IMO themselves. This doesn’t mean that the model is better than them in math, just that mathematicians specialize in extending the frontier of math. The answers are not in the training data. This is not a mode…

It almost certainly is specialized to IMO problems, look at the way it is answering the questions: https://xcancel.com/alexwei_/status/1946477742855532918

E.g here: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GwLtrPeWIAUMDYI.png?name=orig

Frankly it looks to me like it's using an AlphaProof style system, going between natural language and Lean/etc. Of course OpenAI will not tell us any of this.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> high school/early university maths problems should not have been a stretch at all for it This is a ridiculous understatement of the difficulty of getting gold at the IMO.

[flagged]

You'd be surprised at how much math the people who actually get IMO gold know...

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#43

These are high school level only in the sense of assumed background knowledge, they are extremely difficult. Professional mathematicians would not get this level of performance, unless they have a background in IMO themselves. This doesn’t mean that the model is better than them in math, just that mathematicians specialize in extending the frontier of math. The answers are not in the training data. This is not a mode…

It almost certainly is specialized to IMO problems, look at the way it is answering the questions: https://xcancel.com/alexwei_/status/1946477742855532918 E.g here: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GwLtrPeWIAUMDYI.png?name=orig Frankly it looks to me like it's using an AlphaProof style system, going between natural language and Lean/etc. Of course OpenAI will not tell us any of this.

Nope

https://x.com/polynoamial/status/1946478249187377206?s=46&t=...

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#44
From that thread: "The model solved P1 through P5; it did not produce a solution for P6."

It's interesting that it didn't solve the problem that was by far the hardest for humans too. China, the #1 team got only 21/42 points on it. In most other teams nobody solved it.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#45
post #9

Some previous predictions: In 2021 Paul Christiano wrote he would update from 30% to "50% chance of hard takeoff" if we saw an IMO gold by 2025. He thought there was an 8% chance of this happening. Eliezer Yudkowsky said "at least 16%". Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sWLLdG6DWJEy3CH7n/imo-challe...

Impressive prediction, especially pre-ChatGPT. Compare to Gary Marcus 3 months ago: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/reports-of-llms-mastering-...

We may certainly hope Eliezer's other predictions don't prove so well-calibrated.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#46
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It almost certainly is specialized to IMO problems, look at the way it is answering the questions: https://xcancel.com/alexwei_/status/1946477742855532918 E.g here: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GwLtrPeWIAUMDYI.png?name=orig Frankly it looks to me like it's using an AlphaProof style system, going between natural language and Lean/etc. Of course OpenAI will not tell us any of this.

Nope https://x.com/polynoamial/status/1946478249187377206?s=46&t=...

If you don't have a Twitter account then x.com links are useless, use a mirror: https://xcancel.com/polynoamial/status/1946478249187377206

Anyway, that doesn't refute my point, it's just PR from a weaselly and dishonest company. I didn't say it was "IMO-specific" but the output strongly suggests specialized tooling and training, and they said this was an experimental LLM that wouldn't be released. I strongly suspect they basically attached their version of AlphaProof to ChatGPT.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#48
Wow. That's an impressive result, but how did they do it?

Wei references scaling up test-time compute, so I have to assume they threw a boatload of money at this. I've heard talk of running models in parallel and comparing results - if OpenAI ran this 10000 times in parallel and cherry-picked the best one, this is a lot less exciting.

If this is legit, then we need to know what tools were used and how the model used them. I'd bet those are the 'techniques to make them better at hard to verify tasks'.

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