How Not to Read a Headline on AI (ft. new Olympiad Gold, GPT-5 …)

Almost 5 million people saw the headline 48 hours ago that OpenAI have a secret large language model that got gold at the International Math Olympiad. Here though are nine ways to misread that headline. First, this means the AI is now as good as the best mathematicians and could put them out of a job. The IMO is extremely difficult but contains human expert written questions, not questions that no one knows the answer to yet.

I am in awe of the high school competitors who get any medal in it or even qualify to be in the competition truly. But as one UCL math professor said yesterday, math research is about solving problems no one yet knows how to solve. And this requires significant creativity. something notably absent from OpenAI's IMO solutions.

Now, OpenAI's model, apparently out around the end of the year, did not find a correct proof for the hardest problem, requiring the most creativity. That's unlike, by the way, a fair few of the young human participants. The model did get problem 1 through five correct. That is bloody impressive and enough for a gold.

Second misreading of the headline though. This means that OpenAI are now in the lead in AI or maybe language models for mathematics. Well, we actually don't know what the Google effort got in the IMO. This professor is hearing that Google DeepMind also got gold but has not yet announced it.

We will find out in the coming week apparently whether Google DeepMind got problem six correct. Was this why OpenAI rushed the announcement to get there before Google and steal the headlines? Now one of the Google DeepMind researchers on AI for mathematics and a lead of their famous well is actually famous well famous to me alpha geometry system that I discussed 18 months ago True TR retweeted this tweet. Apparently, AI organizations were asked not to report their results for a week to give some space for human celebration.

Unfortunately, Nome Brown of OpenAI said that this message somehow didn't get through to OpenAI. Maybe it wasn't relayed to them. We don't know, but this explains why we don't yet have the Google DeepMind results, which I believe are coming out on the 28th of July, and some other results from a company called Harmonic. Third way to misread this gold medal headline that none of ...