Google and OpenAI’s AI models win milestone gold at International Mathematical Olympiad
The achievement suggests AI is less than a year away from being used to crack unsolved maths research problems, one expert says
The results marked the first time that AI systems crossed the gold-medal scoring threshold at the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) for high-school students.
Both companies’ models solved five out of six problems, achieving the result using general-purpose “reasoning” models that processed mathematical concepts using natural language, in contrast to the previous approaches used by AI firms.
The achievement suggests AI is less than a year away from being used by mathematicians to crack unsolved research problems at the frontier of the field, according to Junehyuk Jung, a maths professor at Brown University and visiting researcher in Google’s DeepMind AI unit.
“I think the moment we can solve hard reasoning problems in natural language will enable the potential for collaboration between AI and mathematicians,” Jung said.
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OpenAI’s breakthrough was achieved with a new experimental model centred on massively scaling up “test-time compute.” This was done by both allowing the model to “think” for longer periods and deploying parallel computing power to run numerous lines of reasoning simultaneously, according to Noam Brown, researcher at OpenAI.