AI simply scored a serious win at a world math competitors.
For the primary time, AI fashions from Google DeepMind and OpenAI achieved gold medal standing on the 2025 Worldwide Math Olympiad (IMO), a difficult math contest for highschool college students that has been held yearly since 1959. The competitors includes two 4.5-hour exams to unravel six whole issues, with out the assistance of the Web or exterior instruments.
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The New York Instances stories that OpenAI and Google’s AI fashions responded to questions utilizing pure language with no human intervention. Each fashions had been in a position to clear up 5 of the six issues offered on the 2025 competitors inside the contest’s time restraints, marking the primary time AI fashions have achieved such a stage of success.
The 2 fashions tied in rating, with every incomes 35 factors out of a potential 42 factors on the IMO, precisely at the cutoff level for a gold medal. OpenAI introduced the outcomes on Saturday whereas Google waited till Monday.
Google DeepMind labored with IMO to have its AI system’s efficiency graded and licensed by the committee this yr, whereas OpenAI didn’t formally enter the competitors. As an alternative, OpenAI requested three former IMO medalists to independently grade its AI mannequin’s solutions to every query, finalizing scores after “unanimous consensus.”
In accordance with the Google announcement, solely 8% of the highschool college students who compete in IMO sometimes obtain a gold medal. Google’s gold-medal efficiency this yr was one step above its outcomes final yr, when its AI obtained a silver medal, fixing 4 out of the six issues offered within the competitors.
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IMO’s President, Dr. Gregor Dolinar, referred to as Google DeepMind’s options this yr “astonishing in lots of respects,” whereas IMO graders discovered [the solutions] to be “clear, exact, and most of them straightforward to comply with,” Dolinar said.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated in a put up on X on Saturday that whereas OpenAI doesn’t plan to launch an AI mannequin with IMO gold capabilities “for a lot of months,” the gold medal was “a major marker of how far AI has come over the previous decade.” OpenAI used a general-purpose reasoning system to sort out the competitors, not a specialised math system, as the corporate works in direction of normal intelligence.
we achieved gold medal stage efficiency on the 2025 IMO competitors with a general-purpose reasoning system! to emphasise, that is an LLM doing math and never a particular formal math system; it’s a part of our essential push in direction of normal intelligence.
once we first began openai,… https://t.co/X46rspI4l6
— Sam Altman (@sama) July 19, 2025
In the meantime, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis wrote in a put up on X on Monday that Google additionally used a complicated model of its general-purpose Gemini reasoning mannequin, which might be accessible “to a set of trusted testers” earlier than rolling it out to Google AI Extremely subscribers, who pay $250 monthly for superior capabilities and 30 TB of storage.
We achieved this yr’s spectacular end result utilizing a complicated model of Gemini Deep Suppose (an enhanced reasoning mode for complicated issues). Our mannequin operated end-to-end in pure language, producing rigorous mathematical proofs immediately from the official drawback descriptions –…
— Demis Hassabis (@demishassabis) July 21, 2025
This yr, 630 highschool college students participated in IMO in Queensland, Australia, with 67 college students reaching gold medals, per Reuters.
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