Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 737 posts

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#441

Post by skepticATX »

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #387
skepticATX wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not trying to take away from the difficulty of the competition. But I went to a relatively well regarded high school and never even heard of IMO until I met competitors during undergrad. I think that the number of students who are even aware of the competition is way lower than the total number of students. I mean, I don’t think I’d have been a great competitor even if I tried. But I’m pretty sure there are a lot…

Are you in the US? Have you heard of the AMC (used to be AHMSE) and the AIME? Those are the feeders to the IMO. If your school had a math team and you were on it, would be surprised if you didn't hear of it You may not have heard of the IMO because no one in school district, possibly even state got in. It is extremely selective (like 20 students in the entire country)

I’m in the US but this was a while back, in the south. It was a highly ranked school and ended up producing lots of PhDs, but many of the families were blue collar and so there just wasn’t any awareness of things like this.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#442

Post by jere »

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…

You could look at 16% as roughly equivalent to a dice roll (1 in 6) or, you know, the odds you lose a round of Russian roulette. That's my charitable interpretation at least. Otherwise it does sound silly.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#443

Post by beyonddream »

rafael859 wrote: post #185

Interesting that the proofs seem to use a limited vocabulary: https://github.com/aw31/openai-imo-2025-proofs/blob/main/pro... Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick :) Also worth pointing out that Alex Wei is himself a gold medalist at IOI.

He is talking about IMO (math olympiad) while he got gold at IOI (informatics olympiad) :)

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#445

Post by efitz »

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.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what AI means about being human. Not about apocalypses or sentience or taking our jobs, but about “what is a human” and “what is the value of a human”.

All my life I’ve taken for granted that your value is related to your positive impact, and that the unique value of humans is that we can create and express things like no other species we’ve encountered.

Now, we have created this thing that has ripped away many of my preconceptions.

If an AI can adequately do whatever a particular person does, then is there still a purpose for that person? What can they contribute? (No I am not proposing or even considering doing anything about it).

It just makes me sad, like something special is going away from the world.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#447

Post by andrepd »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #318
dylanbyte wrote: post #16

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…

> The answers are not in the training data. > This is not a model specialized to IMO problems. Any proof?

There's no proof that this is not made up, let alone any shred of transparency or reproducibility.

There are trillions of dollars at stake in hyping up these products; I take everything these companies write with a cartload of salt.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#448

Post by c1ccccc1 »

danlitt wrote: post #409
c1ccccc1 wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you also get triggered if you saw people make a bet at, say, $24 : $87 odds? Would you shout: "No! That's too precise, you should bet $20 : $90!"? For that matter, should all prices in the stock market be multiples of $1, (since, after all, fluctuations of greater than $1 are very common)? If the variance (uncertainty) in a number is large, correct thing to do is to just also report the variance, not to round t…

> If the variance (uncertainty) in a number is large, correct thing to do is to just also report the variance I really wonder what you mean by this. If I put my finger in the air and estimate the emergence of AGI as 13%, how do I get at the variance of that estimate? At face value, it is a number, not a random variable, and does not have a variance. If you instead view it as a "random sample" from the population of p…

I meant in a general sense that it's better when reporting measurements/estimates of real numbers to report the uncertainty of the estimate alongside the estimate, instead of using some kind of janky rounding procedure to try and communicate that information.

You're absolutely right that if you have a binary random variable like "IMO gold by 2026", then the only thing you can report about its distribution is the probability of each outcome. This only makes it even more unreasonable to try and communicate some kind of "uncertainty" with sig-figs, as the person I was replying to suggested doing!

(To be fair, in many cases you could introduce a latent variable that takes on continuous values and is closely linked to the outcome of the binary variable. Eg: "Chance of solving a random IMO problem for the very best model in 2025". Then that distribution would have both a mean and a variance (and skew, etc), and it could map to a "distribution over probabilities".)

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#449

Post by NooneAtAll3 »

dataflow wrote: post #440
tedsanders wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, this is actually a question that's been looked at empirically! Take a look at this paper: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/rzeckhauser/files/value_of... They took high-precision forecasts from a forecasting tournament and rounded them to coarser buckets (nearest 5%, nearest 10%, nearest 33%), to see if the precision was actually conveying any real information. What they found is that if you rounded th…

Likely vs. unlikely is rounding to 50%. Single digit is rounding to 1%. I don't think the parent was suggesting the former is better than the latter. Even before I read your comment I thought that 5% precision is useful but 1% precision is a silly turn-off, unless that 1% is near the 0% or 100% boundary.

I thought single digit means single significant digit, aka rounding to 10%?

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#450

Post by atleastoptimal »

efitz wrote: post #445
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.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what AI means about being human. Not about apocalypses or sentience or taking our jobs, but about “what is a human” and “what is the value of a human”. All my life I’ve taken for granted that your value is related to your positive impact, and that the unique value of humans is that we can create and express things like no other species we’ve encountered. Now, we have created this thing…

The fact that you're honestly grappling with this reality puts you far ahead of most people.

It seems a common recent neurosis (albeit protective one) to proclaim a permanent human preeminence over the world of value, moral status and such for reasons extremely coupled with our intelligence, and then claim that certain kinds of intelligence have nothing to do with it when our primacy in those specific realms of intelligence is threatened. This will continue until there's nothing humans have left to bargain with.

The world isn't what we want it to be, the world is what it is. The closest thing we have to the world turning out the way we want it making it that way. Which is why I think many of those who hate AI would give their desires for how the world ought to be a better fighting chance by putting in the work to making it so, rather than sitting in denial at what is happening in the world of artificial intelligence.

Post reply on HN