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OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025
681–690 of 737 posts
Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025
#682Terence Tao on the matter - https://imgur.com/a/terence-tao-on-supposed-gold-imo-sMKP0bm
It's a good point - IMO is about performance under some specific resource constraints, and those constraints don't make sense for AIs. But I wonder how far we are from an AI solving a well-studied unsolved math problem. That would be more of a decisive "quantum supremacy" type milestone.
Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025
#683From Noam Brown https://x.com/polynoamial/status/1946478258968531288 "When you work at a frontier lab, you usually know where frontier capabilities are months before anyone else. But this result is brand new, using recently developed techniques. It was a surprise even to many researchers at OpenAI. Today, everyone gets to see where the frontier is." and "This was a small team effort led by @alexwei_ . He took a resea…
That brand new technique? Training on the test data. /s
Hey, cheating is also an artform.
Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025
#684Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair points, but the reason everyone is amazed is that five years ago this was entirely impossible for computers irrespective of the competition format or rules. It’s as-if we had learned whale song, and then within two years a whale had won a Nobel prize for their research in high pressure aquatic environments. You’d similarly get naysayers debating the finer points of what special advantage whales may have in that…
And it’s very impressive that whales can write papers. A computer system that can perform these tasks that were unthinkably complex a few years ago is quite impressive. That is a big win, and it can be celebrated. They don’t need to be celebrated as a “gold medalist” if they didn’t perform according to the same criteria as a gold-medalist.
The same argument works in the reverse: the computer was not given 18 years of calendar time to study. It doesn’t have the benefit of a meat brain with a billion years of evolution optimising it for efficient thought. Etc…
That the architecture of the machine mind is different to ours is the point.
If it was identical then nobody would be excited! That’s a high school student equipped with a biological brain.
That the computer used silicon, that it used parallel agents, that it used whatever it has in its programming is irrelevant except in the sense that these very differences make the achievement more amazing — not less.
Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025
#685Terence Tao on the matter - https://imgur.com/a/terence-tao-on-supposed-gold-imo-sMKP0bm
He is basically asking OpenAI to publish their methodology so we can understand the real state of AI in solving math problems.
Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025
#686Earlier quoted context omitted.
That isn't much of an argument; nothing in math is truly interesting if you take that approach. exp(i\pi)+1=0 could be said to be dis-interesting because it is just rotation on the complex plane. But it is the opposite - it is interesting because it turned out to be rotation on the complex plane but approached from summing infinite series. Similarly you can say that solving a quadratic over complex numbers is dis-int…
It's "not interesting" because no novel insight has to be used in order to solve this. It's immediately obvious how to solve it, just follow the textbook procedure. This is distinct both from other typical IMO problems that I've seen and from research mathematics which usually do require some amount of creativity. > exp(i\pi)+1=0 If your definition of "exp(i*theta)" is literally "rotation of the number 1 by theta deg…
Those definitions of exp are all immediately obvious and nearly the definition of textbook, every university calculus course covers them. That is the issue with defining interesting as novel - nothing generally known is novel any more. And they don't require any special maths - sum_{i=0}^\infty z^n/n! is literally just multiplication and addition.
The long and short of it is it just isn't possible to tell someone that their problem isn't interesting. Interest isn't an inherent property of an equation, it is the state of mind of the person looking at the equation. And in this case the x+y/xy is a classic interesting puzzle despite (really because of) how well known the solution is.
Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025
#687From that thread: "The model solved P1 through P5; it did not produce a solution for P6." It's interesting that it didn't solve the problem that was by far the hardest for humans too. China, the #1 team got only 21/42 points on it. In most other teams nobody solved it.
To me, this is a tell of human-involvement in the model solution. There is no reason why machines would do badly on exactly the problem which humans do badly as well - without humans prodding the machine towards a solution. Also, there is no reason why machines could not produce a partial or wrong answer to problem 6 which seems like survivor bias to me. ie, that only correct solutions were cherrypicked.
While it's zero proof, since the data used for training is human generated, you raise an interesting point: the financial stakes are so high in LLM research that we should be skeptical of all frontier results.
An internet connected machine that reasons like humans was by default considered a fraud 5 years ago; it's not unthinkable some researchers would fake it till they made it, but of course you need proof of it before making such an accusation.
Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025
#688Terence Tao on the matter - https://imgur.com/a/terence-tao-on-supposed-gold-imo-sMKP0bm
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Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025
#689Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair points, but the reason everyone is amazed is that five years ago this was entirely impossible for computers irrespective of the competition format or rules. It’s as-if we had learned whale song, and then within two years a whale had won a Nobel prize for their research in high pressure aquatic environments. You’d similarly get naysayers debating the finer points of what special advantage whales may have in that…
And it’s very impressive that whales can write papers. A computer system that can perform these tasks that were unthinkably complex a few years ago is quite impressive. That is a big win, and it can be celebrated. They don’t need to be celebrated as a “gold medalist” if they didn’t perform according to the same criteria as a gold-medalist.
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Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025
#690Earlier quoted context omitted.
Greatest breakthru in compsci. You mean the one that paves the way for ancient Egyptian slave worker economies? Or totalitarian rule that 1984 couldn't imagine? Or...... Worse? The intermediate classes of society always relied on intelligence and competence to extract money from the powerful. AI means those classes no longer have power.
Right, if people want to talk about how they are worried about a future with super intelligence AI, that's I think something almost everyone can agree on is a worthy topic, maybe to different degrees but not the issue in my mind. I think what it feels like I see a lot, are people who - because of their fear of a future with super intelligent AI - try to like... Deny the significance of the event, if only because they…
It basically comes down to the fact that the AI that exists now will enrich and empower corporations and the government, but won't do much for anybody else.
The pro-AI astroturfers are building the popular consensus of acceptance for what those in power will use AI for: disenfranchisement and oppression. And they are correct because the capabilities of AI right now will enable that, as stated above.
The AI denialists are correct as well: current AI isn't what it is popularly billed. The CEOs are falling over themselves claiming they can cut headcount to zero because of their visionary implementation of AI. It's the old prototype/demo but not the real system snowjob in software sales, alllll over again.
Any actual benefit of AI to the common man comes with the current state of how tech companies "benefit" a consumer: with absurd degrees of privacy invasion, weaponized psychological algorithms, attention destruction, etc.
Here's a fun startup that in invariably in the works: the omnipresent employee monitoring AI. Every click you make, every shit you take, every coffee you sip, and every meeting you tune out. Your facial expressions analyzed, your actual "passion" measured, etc. Amazon is already doing 80% of this without AI in the warehouses.
The only saving grace to that is Covid and WFH, where they don't have the right to intrude on your workspace. So next time you hear about the return to office, remember what is coming....