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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

#721

Post by Tainnor »

csomar wrote: post #672
roenxi wrote: post #646

Earlier 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 is not interesting because there is no “real” solution (pun intended). If you go to the complex plane, you are re-defining the plane. If you redefine the plane, then you can do anything. The puzzle is about confusing the observer who is expecting a solution in a certain dimension.

It's true that it might be unexpected that there is no real solution. I also wouldn't have intuited that from the problem statement itself.

However, it's not like you have to go out of your way to look for the complex numbers in some creative way. At some point while solving the quadratic equation you'll have to take the root of a negative number. So the only choice is to reach for the complex numbers, your hand is kinda forced.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#722

Post by UltraSane »

Jensson wrote: post #674
UltraSane wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans who excel at IMO questions are also "fine tuned" on them in the sense that they practice them for hundreds of hours

Their hardware isn't fine tuned to it though, it uses the same general intelligence hardware that all other humans use. So its a big difference if you use a general intelligence system and makes it do well in math, or when you create a specialized system that is only good at math and can't be used to get good in other areas.

This IMO LLM isn't using fine tuned hardware either.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#723

Post by aprilthird2021 »

qingcharles wrote: post #697
aprilthird2021 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the clear path to improved efficiency now that we've reached peak data?

We're so far from peak data that we've barely even scratched the surface, IMO.

What changed from this announcement?

> “We’ve achieved peak data and there’ll be no more,” OpenAI’s former chief scientist told a crowd of AI researchers.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#724

Post by aprilthird2021 »

jsnell wrote: post #363
aprilthird2021 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the clear path to improved efficiency now that we've reached peak data?

The thing is, people claimed already a year or two ago that we'd reached peak data and progress would stall since there was no more high-quality human-written text available. Turns out they were wrong, and if anything progress accelerated. The progress has come from all kinds of things. Better distillation of huge models to small ones. Tool use. Synthetic data (which is not leading to model collapse like theorized).…

> people claimed already a year or two ago that we'd reached peak data and progress would stall

The claim was we've reached peak data (which, yes we did) and that progress would have to come from some new models or changes. Everything you described has made incremental changes, not step changes. Incremental changes are effectively stalled progress. Even this model has no proof and no release behind it

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#725

Post by bluecalm »

azan_ wrote: post #710
bluecalm wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are missing about chess and go is that those games are not about finding one true solution. They are very psychological games (at human level) and are about finding moves that are difficult to handle for the opponent. You try to understand how your opponent thinks and what is going to be unpleasant for them. This gives a lot of scope for creative and psychological warfare. In competitive math (or programming…

> They are very psychological games (at human level) and are about finding moves that are difficult to handle for the opponent. You try to understand how your opponent thinks and what is going to be unpleasant for them. This gives a lot of scope for creative and psychological warfare. And yet even basic models which can run on my phone win this psychological warfare with best players in the world. The scope of proble…

>>Do you think that they are dumb and unable to learn "few tricks"?

They are just slow because they are humans. It's like in chess: if you calculate million times faster than a human you will win even if you're pretty dumb (old school chess programs). Soon enough Chat GPT will be able to solve IMO problems at international level. It still can't play chess.

>>That's absurd. You could say same things about math research (and "one correct solution" would be wrong as it is for IMO), do you consider it something that's not creative?

Have you missed the other condition? No meaningful math research can be done in 30-60 minutes (time you have for IME problem). Nothing of value that require creativity can be done in short time. Creativity requires forming a mental model, exploration, trying various paths, making connections. This requires time.

My point about math competitions not being taken as seriously also stands. People train chess or go for 10-12 years before they start peaking and then often improve after that as well. This is a lot of hours every day. Math competitions aren't done for so many hours and years and almost no one does them anymore once in college.

This means level at those must be low in comparison to endeavours people pursue professionally.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#726

Post by throw1235435 »

mikert89 wrote: post #133

The 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

Its obvious why though. The typical "tech" culture values human ingenuity, creativity, intelligence and agency due to its history. Someone coming up with a new algorithm in their garage can build a billion dollar business - it is a indie hacker culture that historically valued "human intelligence".

i.e. it is a culture of meritocracy; where no matter your social connections, political or financial capital if you are smart and driven you can make it.

AI flips that around. It devalues human intelligence and moves the moats to the ol' school things of money, influence and power. The big winners are no longer the most hard working, or above average intelligence. Intelligence is devalued; as a wealthy person I now have intelligence at my fingertips making it a commodity rather than a virtue - but money, power and connections - that's now the moat.

If all you have is your talent the future could look quite scary in an AI world long term. Money buys the best models, connections, wealth and power become the remaining moats. This doesn't gel typically in a "indie hacker" like culture in most tech forums.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#727

Post by machiaweliczny »

Dilettante_ wrote: post #520
fnordpiglet wrote: post #95

Earlier 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…

>Why is that less exciting? Because if I have to throw 10000 rocks to get one in the bucket, I am not as good/useful of a rock-into-bucket-thrower as someone who gets it in one shot. People would probably not be as excited about the prospect of employing me to throw rocks for them.

If you don't have automatic way to verify solution then picking correct answer from 10 000 is more impressive than coming with some answer in the first place. If AI tech will be able to effectively prune tree search without eval that would be super big leap but I doubt they achieved this.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#728

Post by machiaweliczny »

asadotzler wrote: post #339
ksec wrote: post #87

I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist for AI. I would likely be called both by the opposite parties. But the fact that AI / LLM is still rapidly improving is impressive in itself and worth celebrating for. Is it perfect, AGI, ASI? No. Is it useless? Absolutely not. I am just happy the prize is so big for AI that there are enough money involve to push for all the hardware advancement. Foundry, Packaging, Interconne…

But unlike the trillion dollars invested in the broadband internet build out between 1998 and 2008, when this 10 year trillion dollar bubble pops, we won't be left with an enduring and useful piece of infrastructure adding a trillion dollars to the global economy annually.

I think that "Query Engine" you can later distill is quite useful artefact. If I were to TP back in time I would take current LLM with me over wikipedia as it's more accessible

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#729

Post by aprilthird2021 »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #352
aprilthird2021 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the clear path to improved efficiency now that we've reached peak data?

> now that we've reached peak data? A) that's not clear B) now we have "reasoning" models that can be used to analyse the data, create n rollouts for each data piece, and "argue" for / against / neutral on every piece of data going into the model. Imagine having every page of a "short story book" + 10 best "how to write" books, and do n x n on them. Huge compute, but basically infinite data as well. We went from "a b…

Are you basically saying synthetic data and having a bunch of models argue with each other to distill the most agreeable of their various outputs solves the issue of peak data?

Because from my vantage point, those have not given step changes in AI utility the way crunching tons of data did. They have only incrementally improved things

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#730

Post by causal »

zug_zug wrote: post #597
causal wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did you get this? Don't see it on the 2025 problem set and now I wanna see if I have the right answer

I asked chatGPT. However it's saying that's 2022 problem 5, however that seems to be clearly wrong... Moreover I can't find that problem anywhere so I don't know if it's a hallucination or something from it's training set that isn't on the internet....

Okay, please don't post ChatGPT output as fact without verification or at least stating where you got it.
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