OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025 • Hacker News Board

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#411

Post by archon1410 » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 6:54 PM UTC

sebzim4500 wrote: post #393

archon1410 wrote: post #381

And of course it's available even in Icelandic, spoken by ~300k people, but not a single Indian language, spoken by hundreds of millions. भारत दुर्दशा न देखी जाई...

Presumably almost all competitors from India would be fluent in English (given it is the second most spoken language there)? I guess the same is true of Icelandic though.

Yes, and there's also languages of ex-USSR countries, whose competitors presumably all understand Russian, and so on.

The real reason might be that there's an enormous class of self-loathing elites in India who actively despise the possibility of any Indian language being represented in higher education. This obviously stunts the possibility of them being used in international competitions.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#412

Post by atleastoptimal » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 6:54 PM UTC

>AI model performs astounding feat everyone claimed was impossible or won’t be achieved for a while

>Commenters on HN claim it must not be that hard, or OpenAI is lying, or cheated. Anything but admit that it is impressive

Every time on this site lol. A lot of people here have an emotional aversion to accepting AI progress. They’re deep in the bargaining/anger/denial phase.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#413

Post by OtherShrezzing » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 6:54 PM UTC

The 4 hours time limit is a bit of an odd metric, given that OpenAI have effectively an unlimited amount of compute at their disposal. If they’re running the model on 100,000 GPUs for 4hrs, that’s obviously going to have better outcomes than running it on 5.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#414

Post by alach11 » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 6:54 PM UTC

futureshock wrote: post #334

demirbey05 wrote: post #277

Google also joined IMO, and got gold prize. https://x.com/natolambert/status/1946569475396120653 OAI announced early, probably we will hear announcement from Google soon.

Google’s AlphaProof, which got a silver last year, has been using a neural symbolic approach. This gold from OpenAI was pure LLM. We’ll have to see what Google announces, but the LLM approach is interesting because it will likely generalize to all kinds of reasoning problems, not just mathematical proofs.

> it will likely generalize to all kinds of reasoning problems, not just mathematical proofs

Big if true. Setting up an RL loop for training on math problems seems significantly easier than many other reasoning domains. Much easier to verify correctness of a proof than to verify correctness (what would this even mean?) for a short story.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#415

Post by tedsanders » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 6:55 PM UTC

chairhairair wrote: post #77

OpenAI simply can’t be trusted on any benchmarks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42761648

Not to beat a dead horse or get into a debate, but to hopefully clarify the record:

- OpenAI denied training on FrontierMath, FrontierMath-derived data, or data targeting FrontierMath specifically

- The training data for o3 was frozen before OpenAI even downloaded FrontierMath

- The final o3 model was selected before OpenAI looked at o3's FrontierMath results

Primary source: https://x.com/__nmca__/status/1882563755806281986

You can of course accuse OpenAI of lying or being fraudulent, and if that's how you feel there's probably not much I can say to change your mind. One piece of evidence against this is that the primary source linked above no longer works at OpenAI, and hasn't chosen to blow the whistle on the supposed fraud. I work at OpenAI myself, training reasoning models and running evals, and I can vouch that I have no knowledge or hint of any cheating; if I did, I'd probably quit on the spot and absolutely wouldn't be writing this comment.

Totally fine not to take every company's word at face value, but imo this would be a weird conspiracy for OpenAI, with very high costs on reputation and morale.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#416

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 6:55 PM UTC

sailingparrot wrote: post #256

z7 wrote: 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...

Off topic, but am I the only one getting triggered every time I see a rationalist quantify their prediction of the future with single digit accuracy? It's like their magic way of trying to get everyone to forget that they reached their conclusion in completely hand-wavy way, just like every other human being. But instead of saying "low confidence" or "high confidence" like the rest of us normies, they will tell you t…

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#417

Post by demaga » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 6:56 PM UTC

atleastoptimal wrote: post #412

>AI model performs astounding feat everyone claimed was impossible or won’t be achieved for a while >Commenters on HN claim it must not be that hard, or OpenAI is lying, or cheated. Anything but admit that it is impressive Every time on this site lol. A lot of people here have an emotional aversion to accepting AI progress. They’re deep in the bargaining/anger/denial phase.

It's a good camp to be in. If we're wrong, that will be awesome!

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#418

Post by Oras » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 6:57 PM UTC

atleastoptimal wrote: post #412

>AI model performs astounding feat everyone claimed was impossible or won’t be achieved for a while >Commenters on HN claim it must not be that hard, or OpenAI is lying, or cheated. Anything but admit that it is impressive Every time on this site lol. A lot of people here have an emotional aversion to accepting AI progress. They’re deep in the bargaining/anger/denial phase.

Get ready to downvoted, the wave of single minded is coming

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#419

Post by mort96 » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 6:58 PM UTC

Velorivox wrote: post #358

wds wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think we’re close to AI substantially contributing to scientific discovery. The new "Full Self-Driving next year"?

"AI" already contributes "substantially" to "scientific discovery". It's a very safe statement to make, whereas "full self-driving" has some concrete implications.

"AI" here means language models. Machine learning has been contributing to scientific discovery for ages, but this new wave of hype that marketing departments are calling "AI" are language models.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#420

Post by NitpickLawyer » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 6:59 PM UTC

atleastoptimal wrote: post #412

>AI model performs astounding feat everyone claimed was impossible or won’t be achieved for a while >Commenters on HN claim it must not be that hard, or OpenAI is lying, or cheated. Anything but admit that it is impressive Every time on this site lol. A lot of people here have an emotional aversion to accepting AI progress. They’re deep in the bargaining/anger/denial phase.

A problem as old as the field. Quote from the 80s:

> There is a related “Theorem” about progress in AI: once some mental function is programmed, people soon cease to consider it as an essential ingredient of “real thinking”. The ineluctable core of intelligence is always in that next thing which hasn’t yet been programmed. This “Theorem” was first proposed to me by Larry Tesler, so I call it Tesler’s Theorem: “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.”