AI fashions from OpenAI and Google DeepMind achieved gold medal scores within the 2025 Worldwide Math Olympiad (IMO), one of many world’s oldest and most difficult highschool degree math competitions, the businesses independently introduced in latest days.
The outcome underscores simply how briskly AI programs are advancing, and but, how evenly matched Google and OpenAI appear to be within the AI race. AI firms are competing fiercely for the general public notion of behind forward within the AI race: an intangible battle of “vibes” that may have large implications for securing prime AI expertise. Plenty of AI researchers come from backgrounds in aggressive math, so benchmarks like IMO imply greater than others.
Final 12 months, Google scored a silver medal at IMO utilizing a “formal” system, that means it required people to translate issues right into a machine‑readable format. This 12 months, each OpenAI and Google entered “casual” programs into the competitors, which had been capable of ingest questions and generate proof‑based mostly solutions in pure language. Each firms declare their AI fashions scored larger than most highschool college students and Google’s AI mannequin from final 12 months, with out requiring any human-machine translation.
In interviews with TechCrunch, researchers behind OpenAI and Google’s IMO efforts claimed that these gold medal performances symbolize breakthroughs round AI reasoning fashions in non-verifiable domains. Whereas AI reasoning fashions are likely to do nicely on questions with simple solutions, corresponding to math or coding duties, these programs battle on duties with extra ambiguous options, corresponding to shopping for an incredible chair or serving to with complicated analysis.
Nonetheless, Google is elevating questions round how OpenAI performed and introduced its gold medal IMO efficiency. In any case, if you happen to’re going to enter AI fashions right into a math contest for prime schoolers, you may as nicely argue like youngsters.
Shortly after OpenAI introduced its feat on Saturday morning, Google DeepMind’s CEO and researchers took to social media to slam OpenAI for announcing its gold‑medal prematurely — shortly after IMO introduced which excessive schoolers had gained the competitors on Friday night time — and for not having their mannequin’s take a look at formally evaluated by IMO.
Thang Luong, a Google DeepMind senior researcher and lead for the IMO mission, instructed TechCrunch that Google waited to announce its IMO outcomes to respect the scholars collaborating within the competitors.
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Luong mentioned that Google has been working with IMO’s organizers since final 12 months in preparation for the take a look at and wished to have the IMO president’s blessing and official grading earlier than announcing its official results, which it did on Monday morning.
“The IMO organizers have their grading guideline,” Luong mentioned. “So any analysis that’s not based mostly on that guideline couldn’t make any declare about gold-medal degree [performance].”
Noam Brown, a senior OpenAI researcher who labored on the IMO mannequin, instructed TechCrunch that IMO reached out to OpenAI a couple of months in the past about collaborating in a proper math competitors, however the ChatGPT-maker declined as a result of it was engaged on pure language programs that it thought had been extra price pursuing. Brown says OpenAI didn’t know IMO was conducting a casual take a look at with Google.
OpenAI says it employed third-party evaluators — three former IMO medalists who understood the grading system — to grade its AI mannequin’s efficiency. After OpenAI discovered of its gold medal rating, Brown mentioned the corporate reached out to IMO, which then instructed the corporate to attend to announce till after IMO’s Friday night time award ceremony.
IMO didn’t reply to TechCrunch’s request for remark.
Google isn’t essentially mistaken right here — it did undergo a extra official, rigorous course of to attain its gold medal rating — however the debate might miss the larger image: AI fashions from a number of main AI labs are enhancing rapidly. Nations from world wide despatched their brightest college students to compete at IMO this 12 months, and only a few p.c of them scored in addition to OpenAI and Google’s AI fashions did.
Whereas OpenAI used to have a big lead over the business, it definitely feels as if the race is extra carefully matched than any firm wish to admit. OpenAI is predicted to launch GPT-5 within the coming months, and the corporate definitely hopes to offer off the impression that it nonetheless leads the AI business.