Google AI system wins gold medal in International Mathematical Olympiad
It was the first time that a machine – which solved five of the six problems at the 2025 competition, held in Australia this month – reached that level of success, Google said in a blog post Monday.
The news is another sign that leading companies are continuing to improve their AI systems in areas such as math, science and computer coding. This kind of technology could accelerate the research of mathematicians and scientists and streamline the work of experienced computer programmers.
Two days before Google revealed its feat, an OpenAI researcher said in a social media post that the startup had built technology that achieved a similar score on this year's questions, although it did not officially enter the competition.
Both systems were chatbots that received and responded to the questions much like humans. Other AI systems have participated in the International Mathematical Olympiad, or IMO, but they could answer questions only after human experts translated them into a computer programming language built for solving math problems.
'We solved these problems fully in natural language,' Thang Luong, a senior staff research scientist at Google DeepMind, said in an interview. 'That means there was no human intervention – at all.'
After OpenAI started the AI boom with the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, the leading chatbots could answer questions, write poetry, summarise news articles, even write a little computer code. But they often struggled with math.
Over the past two years, companies such as Google and OpenAI have built AI systems better suited to mathematics, including complex problems that the average person cannot solve.
Last year, Google DeepMind unveiled two systems that were designed for math: AlphaGeometry and AlphaProof. Competing in the IMO, these systems achieved 'silver medal' performance, solving four of the competition's six problems. It was the first time a machine reached silver-medal status. Other companies, including a startup called Harmonic, have built similar systems.
But systems such as AlphaProof and Harmonic are not chatbots. They can answer questions only after mathematicians translate the questions into Lean, a computer programming language designed for solving math problems.
This year, Google entered the IMO with a chatbot that could read and respond to questions in English. This system is not yet available to the public.
Called Gemini Deep Think, the technology is what scientists call a 'reasoning' system. This kind of system is designed to reason through tasks involving math, science and computer programming. Unlike previous chatbots, this technology can spend time thinking through complex problems before settling on an answer.
Other companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic and China's DeepSeek, offer similar technologies.
Like other chatbots, a reasoning system initially learns its skills by analysing enormous amounts of text culled from across the internet. Then it learns additional behaviour through extensive trial and error in a process called reinforcement learning.
A reasoning system can be expensive, because it spends additional time thinking about a response. Google said Deep Think had spent the same amount of time with the IMO as human participants did: 4 1/2 hours. But the company declined to say how much money, processing power or electricity had been used to complete the test.
In December, an OpenAI system surpassed human performance on a closely watched reasoning test called ARC-AGI. But the company ran afoul of competition rules because it spent nearly US$1.5mil (RM6.3mil) in electricity and computing costs to complete the test, according to pricing estimates. – ©2025 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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