OpenAI and Google win at the world's most prestigious math competition

Euronews

4 days ago

Artificial intelligence (AI) models were put to the test this weekend to find out who was the best so-called mathlete at the world's most prestigious competition in Australia.
Google's DeepMind and OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, say they both achieved a gold medal-level performance at this year's International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), thoughonly Google had actually entered the competition.
The IMO confirmed DeepMind's results, whereas OpenAI evaluated its model on the 2025 IMO problems and self-published its results before official verification.
Alex Wei, a research scientist at OpenAI working on large language models (LLMs) and reasoning, announced the results on his X account.
An advanced version of DeepMind's Gemini Deep Think solved five out of the six IMO problems perfectly, earning 35 total points and achieving gold-medal level performance.
OpenAI's model also solved five out of the six IMO problems and had the same score.
Both models show how far AI has come since the technology catapulted with the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022.
The math test in itself is very hard and only about 10 per cent of the 630 competitors received a gold medal this year.
Participants from more than 100 countries entered the competition, which is aimed at elite high-school students. Those under the age of 20 can apply.
'When we first started OpenAI, this was a dream but not one that felt very realistic to us; it is a significant marker of how far AI has come over the past decade,' OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on X in reference to the math competition.
He added that the company will 'soon' release a new version, GPT-5, but that it doesn't plan 'to release a model with IMO gold level of capability for many months'.
Meanwhile, Google wrote in a blog post: "It is a significant marker of how far AI has come over the past decade".
The company participated in the competition last year and won a silver medal. "Our leap from silver to gold medal-standard in just one year shows a remarkable pace of progress in AI," Google said.
However, both companies celebrated the human participants and avoided framing the competition as a man versus machine challenge.
Wei called them "some of the brightest young minds of the future" and said that OpenAI employs some former IMO competitors.