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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

#21

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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Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#22

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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Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#23

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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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 mathematicians)

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#24
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.

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sorry but I don't think it's accurate to say "they are just challenging for the age range"

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#25

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…

Are you sure this is not specialized to IMO? I do see the twitter thread saying it's "general reasoning" but I'd imagine they RL'd on olympiad math questions? If not I really hope someone from OpenAI says that bc it would be pretty astounding.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#26

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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Getting gold at the IMO is pretty damn hard.

I grew up in a relatively underserved rural city. I skipped multiple grades in math, completed the first two years of college math classes while in high school, and won the award for being the best at math out of everyone in my school.

I've met and worked with a few IMO gold medalists. Even though I was used to scoring in the 99th percentile on all my tests, it felt like these people were simply in another league above me.

I'm not trying to toot my own horn. I'm definitely not that smart. But it's just ridiculous to shoot down the capabilities of these models at this point.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#27
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Velocity of AI progress in recent years is exceeded only by velocity of goalposts.

The goalposts should focus on being able to make a coherent statement using papers on a subject with sources. At this point it can't do that for any remotely cutting edge topic. This is just a distraction.

The idea of a computer being able to solve IMO problems it has not seen before in natural language even just 3 years ago would be completely science fiction. This is astounding progress.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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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…

I sense we may just have a different experience related to colleagues skill sets as I can think of 5 people I could send some questions too and I know they would do them just fine. Infact we often have done similar problems on a free afternoon and I often do similar on flights as a way to pass the time and improve my focus (my issue isn't my talent/understanding at maths, it's my ability to concentrate). I don't disagree that some level of training is needed but these questions aren't unique, nor impossible, especially as said training does exist and LLM's can access said examples. LLM's also have brute force which is a significant help with these type of issues. One particular point is that Math of all the STEM topics to try and focus on probably is the best documented alongside CS.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#29
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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sorry but I don't think it's accurate to say "they are just challenging for the age range"

I'm aware you believe they are impossible tasks unless you have specific training, I happen to disagree with that.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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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 to work on it for a week, would solve it. As for "gold level", with IMO problems you either solve one or you don't.

You could counter that it is meaningless to remove the time constraints. But we are comparing humans with OpenAI here. It is very likely OpenAI solved the IMO problems in a matter of minutes, maybe even seconds. When we talk about a chatbot achieving human-level performance, it's understood that the time is not a constraint on the human side. We are only concerned with the quality of the human output. For example: can OpenAI write a novel at the level of Jane Austen? Maybe it can, maybe it can't (for now) but Jane Austen was spending years to write such a novel, while our expectation is for OpenAI to do it at the speed of multiple words per second.

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