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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

#61
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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It's like saying getting a gold medal in boxing is not hard, because it doesn't involve any firearms

More fair comparison: Military grade killbot enters ring with boxer and proceeds to fire pneumatic hammer at boxer until KO?

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#62

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…

I don't think it's much less exciting if they ran it 10000 parallel? It implies an ability to discern when the proof is correct and rigorous (which o3 can't do consistently) and also means that outputting the full proof is within capabilities even if rare.

The whole point of RL is if you can get it to work 0.01% of the time you can get it to work 100% of the time.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#63
post #7

Progress is astounding. Recently report published about evaluation of LLMs on IMO 2025. o3 high didn't even get bronze. https://matharena.ai/imo/ Waiting for Terry Tao's thoughts, but these kind of things are good use of AI. We need to make science progress faster rather than disrupting our economy without being ready.

[flagged]

I feel like I've noticed you you making the same comment 12 places in this thread -- incorrectly misrepresenting the difficulty of this tournament and ultimately it comes across as a bitter ex.

Here's an example problem 5:

Let a1,a2,…,an be distinct positive integers and let M=max⁡1≤iFind the maximum number of pairs (i,j) with 1≤i<j≤n for which (ai +aj )(aj −ai )=M.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#65
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.

Gary Marcus is so systematically and overconfidently wrong that I wonder why we keep talking about this clown.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#66
post #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.

I think from Canada team someone solved it but among all, its very few

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#67

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…

>if OpenAI ran this 10000 times in parallel and cherry-picked the best one, this is a lot less exciting.

That entirely depends on who did the cherry picking. If the LLM had 10000 attempts and each time a human had to falsify it, this story means absolutely nothing. If the LLM itself did the cherry picking, then this is just akin to a human solving a hard problem. Attempting solutions and falsifying them until the desired result is achieved. Just that the LLM scales with compute, while humans operate only sequentially.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#68

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…

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I am a professor in a math department (I teach statistics but there is a good complement of actual math PhDs) and there are only about 10% who care about these types of problems and definitely less than half who could get gold on an IMO test even if they didn’t care.

They are all outstanding mathematicians, but the IMO type questions are not something that mathematicians can universally solve without preparation.

There are of course some places that pride themselves on only taking “high scoring” mathematicians, and people will introduce themselves with their name and what they scored on the Putnam exam. I don’t like being around those places or people.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I assure you >50% of working mathematicians will not score gold level at IMO consistently (I'm in the field). As the original parent said, pretty much only ppl who had the training in high school can. Like number theorists without training might be able to do some number theory IMO questions but this level is basically impossible without specialized training (with maybe a few exceptions of very strong mathematicia…

> No I assure you >50% of working mathematicians will not score gold level at IMO consistently (I'm in the field) I agree with you. However, would a lot of working mathematicians score gold level without the IMO time constraints? Working mathematicians generally are not trying to solve a problem in the time span of one hour. I would argue that most working mathematicians, if given an arbitrary IMO problem and allowed…

> It is very likely OpenAI solved the IMO problems in a matter of minutes, maybe even seconds

Really? My expectation would have been the opposite, that time was a constraint for the AIs. OpenAI's highest end public reasoning models are slow, and there's only so much that you can do by parallelization.

Understanding how they dealt with time actually seems like the most important thing to put these results into context, and they said nothing about it. Like, I'd hope they gave the same total time allocation for a whole problem set as the human competitors. But how did they split that time? Did they work on multiple problems in parallel?

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#70
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.

I do think Gary Marcus says a lot of wrong stuff about LLMs but I don’t see anything too egregious in that post. He’s just describing the results they got a few months ago.
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