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 excessive school-level math competitions, the businesses independently introduced in latest days.
The outcomes underscore simply how briskly AI methods are advancing, and but, how evenly matched Google and OpenAI appear to be within the AI race. AI corporations are competing fiercely for the general public notion of being forward within the AI race: an intangible battle of “vibes” that may have huge 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 yr, 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 yr, each OpenAI and Google entered “casual” methods into the competitors, which had been capable of ingest questions and generate proof‑primarily based solutions in pure language. Each corporations declare their AI fashions appropriately answered 5 out of six questions on IMO’s check, scoring larger than most highschool college students and Google’s AI mannequin from final yr, 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 easy solutions, akin to basic math or coding duties, these methods wrestle on duties with extra ambiguous options, akin to shopping for an ideal chair or serving to with complicated analysis.
Nevertheless, Google is elevating questions round how OpenAI performed and introduced its gold-medal IMO efficiency. In any case, in case you’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 asserting 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 check formally evaluated by IMO.
Btw as an apart, we didn’t announce on Friday as a result of we revered the IMO Board’s unique request that each one AI labs share their outcomes solely after the official outcomes had been verified by impartial consultants & the scholars had rightly acquired the acclamation they deserved— Demis Hassabis (@demishassabis) July 21, 2025
Thang Luong, a Google DeepMind senior researcher and lead for the IMO mission, advised TechCrunch that Google waited to announce its IMO outcomes to respect the scholars collaborating within the competitors.
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Luong stated that Google has been working with IMO’s organizers since final yr in preparation for the check and needed to have the IMO president’s blessing and official grading earlier than asserting its official outcomes, which it did on Monday morning.
“The IMO organizers have their grading guideline,” Luong stated. “So any analysis that’s not primarily based 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, advised TechCrunch that IMO reached out to OpenAI a number 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 methods that it thought had been extra value pursuing. Brown says OpenAI didn’t know IMO was conducting an off-the-cuff check 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 realized of its gold-medal rating, Brown stated the corporate reached out to IMO, which then advised 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 incorrect right here — it did undergo a extra official, rigorous course of to realize its gold-medal rating — however the debate might miss the larger image: AI fashions from a number of main AI labs are bettering shortly. International locations from world wide despatched their brightest college students to compete at IMO this yr, and just some p.c of them scored in addition to OpenAI and Google’s AI fashions did.
Whereas OpenAI used to have a major lead over the trade, it definitely feels as if the race is extra carefully matched than any firm want to admit. OpenAI is anticipated to launch GPT-5 within the coming months, and the corporate definitely hopes to provide off the impression that it nonetheless leads the AI trade.
