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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

#151

Post by yunwal »

rvz wrote: post #145
softwaredoug wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because both sides have strong vested interests and it’s next to impossible to find a dispassionate point of view. The Pro AI crowd, VC, tech CEOs etc have strong incentive to claim humans are obsolete. Many tech employees see threats to their jobs and want to poopoo any way AI could be useful or competitive.

Or some can spot a euphoric bubble when they see it with lots of participants who have over-invested in 90% of these so called AI startups that are not frontier labs.

What does this have to do with the math Olympiad? Why would it frame your view of the accomplishment?

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#152

Post by blamestross »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #140
mikert89 wrote: post #133

The cynicism/denial on HN about AI is exhausting. Half the comments are some weird form of explaining away the ever increasing performance of these models I've been reading this website for probably 15 years, its never been this bad. many threads are completely unreadable, all the actual educated takes are on X, its almost like there was a talent drain

The overconfidence/short sightedness on HN about AI is exhausting. Half the comments are some weird form of explaining how developers will be obsolete in five years and how close we are to AGI.

Nobody likes the idea that this is only "economical superior AI". Not as good as humans, but a LOT cheaper.

The "It will just get better" is bubble baiting the investors. The tech companies learned from the past and they are riding and managing the bubble to extract maximum ROI before it pops.

The reality is a lot of work done by humans can be replaced by an LLM with lower quality and nuance. The loss in sales/satisfaction/ect is more than offset by the reduced cost.

The current model of LLMs are enshitification accelerators and that will have real effects.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#155

Post by kenjackson »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #132
quirino wrote: post #104

I think equally impressive is the performance of the OpenAI team at the "AtCoder World Tour Finals 2025" a couple of days ago. There were 12 human participants and only one did better than OpenAI. Not sure there is a good writeup about it yet but here is the livestream: https://www.youtube.com/live/TG3ChQH61vE .

And yet when working on production code current LLMs are about as good as a poor intern. Not sure why the disconnect.

Depends. I’ve been using it for some of my workflows and I’d say it is more like a solid junior developer with weird quirks where it makes stupid mistakes and other times behaves as a 30 year SME vet.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#156

Post by orbital-decay »

softwaredoug wrote: post #136
mikert89 wrote: post #133

The cynicism/denial on HN about AI is exhausting. Half the comments are some weird form of explaining away the ever increasing performance of these models I've been reading this website for probably 15 years, its never been this bad. many threads are completely unreadable, all the actual educated takes are on X, its almost like there was a talent drain

Probably because both sides have strong vested interests and it’s next to impossible to find a dispassionate point of view. The Pro AI crowd, VC, tech CEOs etc have strong incentive to claim humans are obsolete. Many tech employees see threats to their jobs and want to poopoo any way AI could be useful or competitive.

That's a huge hyperbole. I can assure you many people find the entire thing genuinely fascinating, without having any vested interest and without buying the hype.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#157

Post by Aurornis »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #140
mikert89 wrote: post #133

The cynicism/denial on HN about AI is exhausting. Half the comments are some weird form of explaining away the ever increasing performance of these models I've been reading this website for probably 15 years, its never been this bad. many threads are completely unreadable, all the actual educated takes are on X, its almost like there was a talent drain

The overconfidence/short sightedness on HN about AI is exhausting. Half the comments are some weird form of explaining how developers will be obsolete in five years and how close we are to AGI.

> Half the comments are some weird form of explaining how developers will be obsolete in five years and how close we are to AGI.

I do not see that at all in this comment section.

There is a lot of denial and cynicism like the parent comment suggested. The comments trying to dismiss this as just “some high school math problem” are the funniest example.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#158

Post by logicchains »

parasubvert wrote: post #108
fnordpiglet wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that less exciting? A machine competing in an unconstrained natural language difficult math contest and coming out on top by any means is breath taking science fiction a few years ago - now it’s not exciting? Regardless of the tools for verification or even solvers - why is the goal post moving so fast? There is no bonus for “purity of essence” and using only neural networks. We live in an era where it’s hard…

I think the main hesitancy is due to rampant anthropomorphism. These models cannot reason, they pattern match language tokens and generate emergent behaviour as a result. Certainly the emergent behaviour is exciting but we tend to jump to conclusions as to what it implies. This means we are far more trusting with software that lacks formal guarantees than we should be. We are used to software being sound by default b…

>I think the main hesitancy is due to rampant anthropomorphism. These models cannot reason, they pattern match language tokens and generate emergent behaviour as a result

This is rampant human chauvinism. There's absolutely no empirical basis for the statement that these models "cannot reason", it's just pseudoscientific woo thrown around by people who want to feel that humans are somehow special. By pretty much every empirical measure of "reasoning" or intelligence we have, SOTA LLMs are better at it than the average human.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#159

Post by gellybeans »

mikert89 wrote: post #133

The cynicism/denial on HN about AI is exhausting. Half the comments are some weird form of explaining away the ever increasing performance of these models I've been reading this website for probably 15 years, its never been this bad. many threads are completely unreadable, all the actual educated takes are on X, its almost like there was a talent drain

Making an account just to point out how these comments are far more exhausting, because they don't engage with the subject matter. They are just agreeing with a headline and saying, "See?"

You say, "explaining away the increasing performance" as though that was a good faith representation of arguments made against LLMs, or even this specific article. Questionong the self-congragulatory nature of these businesses is perfectly reasonable.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#160

Post by jsnell »

do_not_redeem wrote: post #134
stingraycharles wrote: post #121

My issue with all these citations is that it’s all OpenAI employees that make these claims. I’ll wait to see third party verification and/or use it myself before judging. There’s a lot of incentives right now to hype things up for OpenAI.

A third party tried this experiment with publicly available models. OpenAI did half as well as Gemini, and none of the models even got bronze. https://matharena.ai/imo/

I feel you're misunderstanding something. That's not "this exact experiment". Matharena is testing publicly available models against the IMO problem set. OpenAI was announcing the results of a new, unpublished model, on that problems set.

It is totally fair to discount OpenAI's statement until we have way more details about their setup, and maybe even until there is some level of public access to the model. But you're doing something very different: implying that their results are fraudulent and (incorrectly) using the Matharena results as your proof.

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