[deleted]
OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025
201–210 of 737 posts
Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025
#202Earlier 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…
> These models cannot reason
Not trying to be a smarty pants here, but what do we mean by "reason"?
Just to make the point, I'm using Claude to help me code right now. In between prompts, I read HN.
It does things for me such as coding up new features, looking at the compile and runtime responses, and then correcting the code. All while I sit here and write with you on HN.
It gives me feedback like "lock free message passing is going to work better here" and then replaces the locks with the exact kind of thing I actually want. If it runs into a problem, it does what I did a few weeks ago, it will see that some flag is set wrong, or that some architectural decision needs to be changed, and then implements the changes.
What is not reasoning about this? Last year at this time, if I looked at my code with a two hour delta, and someone had pushed edits that were able to compile, with real improvements, I would not have any doubt that there was a reasoning, intelligent person who had spent years learning how this worked.
It is pattern matching? Of course. But why is that not reasoning? Is there some sort of emergent behavior? Also yes. But what is not reasoning about that?
I'm having actual coding conversations that I used to only have with senior devs, right now, while browsing HN, and code that does what I asked is being produced.
Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
OpenAI have already shown us they aren’t trustworthy. Remember the FrontierMath debacle?
It's only a "debacle" if you already assume OpenAI isn't trustworthy, because they said they don't train on the test set. I hope you can see that presenting your belief that they lied about training on the test set as evidence of them being untrustworthy is a circular argument. You're assuming the thing you're trying to prove. The one OpenAI "scandal" that I did agree with was the thing where they threatened to cance…
They funded the entire benchmark and didn’t disclose their involvement. They then proceeded to make use of the benchmark while pretending like they weren’t affiliated with EpochAI. That’s a huge omission and more than enough reason to distrust their claims.
Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is a claim , "clear evidence" to anything?
Most evidence you have about the world is claims from other people, not direct experiment. There seems to be a thought-terminating cliche here on HN, dismissing any claim from employees of large tech companies. Unlike seemingly most here on HN, I judge people's trustworthiness individually and not solely by the organization they belong to. Noam Brown is a well known researcher in the field and I see no reason to doub…
> I judge people's trustworthiness individually and not solely by the organization they belong to
This is certainly a courageous viewpoint – I imagine this makes it very hard for you to engage in the modern world? Most of us are very bound by institutions we operate in!
Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025
#205The 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
Makes sense. Everyone here has their pride and identity tied to their ability to code. HN likes to upvote articles related to IQ because coding correlates with IQ and HNers like to think they are smart. AI is of course a direct attack on the average HNers identity. The response you see is like attacking a Christian on his religion. The pattern of defense is typical. When someone’s identity gets attacked they need to…
[flagged]
Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
dude we have computers reasoning in english to solve math problems, what are you even talking about
I tested all available models on a harder highschool limit and they failed even with thinking mode, so I doubt OpenAI is telling the truth.
Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's only a "debacle" if you already assume OpenAI isn't trustworthy, because they said they don't train on the test set. I hope you can see that presenting your belief that they lied about training on the test set as evidence of them being untrustworthy is a circular argument. You're assuming the thing you're trying to prove. The one OpenAI "scandal" that I did agree with was the thing where they threatened to cance…
They funded the entire benchmark and didn’t disclose their involvement. They then proceeded to make use of the benchmark while pretending like they weren’t affiliated with EpochAI. That’s a huge omission and more than enough reason to distrust their claims.
IMO their involvement is only an issue if they gained an advantage on the benchmark by it. If they didn't train on the test set then their gained advantage is minimal and I don't see a big problem with it nor do I see an obligation to disclose. Especially since there is a hold-out set that OpenAI doesn't have access to, which can detect any malfeasance.
Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025
#208The 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
It's caught in a kind of feedback loop. There are only so many times you can see "stochastic parrot" or "fancy autocomplete" or "can't draw hands" or "just a bunch of matmuls, it can't replicate the human soul" lines before you decide to just not engage. This leads to more of the content being exactly that, driving more people away.
At this point, there are much better places to find technical discussion of AI, pros and cons. Even Reddit.
Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ever…
> This is rampant human chauvinism
What in the accelerationist hell?
Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025
#210The 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
> I've been reading this website for probably 15 years, its never been this bad.
People here were pretty skeptical about AlexNet, when it won the ImageNet challenge 13 years ago.