Openai and Google outperform Mathletes, but not each other

From the ai model Openai and Google DeepMind The company recently announced it was independently announced that it achieved a gold medal score at the 2025 International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO), one of the world’s oldest and most challenging high school-level mathematics competitions.

The result is highlighting how fast AI systems are progressing, but still highlighting whether Google and Openai are evenly matched in the AI race. AI companies are competing fiercely for public awareness in the AI race. This is an intangible battle of “atmosphere” that has a great deal of meaning to secure the talent of top AI. Many AI researchers come from competitive mathematics backgrounds, so benchmarks like IMO make more sense than others.

last year, Google won a silver medal at IMO Using “formal” systems meant that humans had to convert problems into machine-readable formats. This year, both Openai and Google have taken the “unofficial” system into the competition. This allowed us to ingest questions and generate proof-based answers in natural language. Both companies claim that the AI model scores higher than most high school students and Google’s AI models last year, without the need for human machines to translate.

In an interview with TechCrunch, researchers behind Openai and Google’s IMO efforts argued that these gold medal performances represent breakthroughs around AI inference models in irresponsible domains. AI inference models tend to do well with questions with simple answers such as mathematics and coding tasks, but these systems struggle with tasks with more ambiguous solutions, such as buying a good chair or supporting complex research.

However, Google has raised questions about how Openai performed and announced the gold medal IMO. After all, if you’re going to participate in AI models in a mathematics contest for high school students, you can also discuss it like a teenager.

Shortly after Openai announced its feat on Saturday morning, CEO of Google Deepmind And the researchers took him to social media. Slam Open announced early gold medals – Shortly after IMO announced which high school students won the competition on Friday night, and approved that their model tests were not officially evaluated by the IMO.

Thang Luong, a senior researcher at Google Deepmind and lead of the IMO project, told TechCrunch that he is waiting for Google to release IMO results to honor students who are competing.

Luong said Google has been working with IMO organizers to prepare for the test since last year, and would like to face the IMO president’s blessing and official grading. Announce the official results from Monday morning.

“IMO organizers have grading guidelines,” says Luong. “Therefore, no assessment based on that guidelines could have made a claim to gold medal level (performance).”

Norm Brown, a senior open researcher who worked on the IMO model, told TechCrunch a few months ago that IMO had reached out to Openai about participating in a formal mathematics competition, but declined because ChatGpt-Maker was working on a natural language system and thought it was worth pursuing. Brown says Openai didn’t know that IMO was doing unofficial testing on Google.

Openai says it hired three former IMO medalists who understood the grading system to assess the performance of the AI model. After Openai learned of the gold medal score, Brown said the company had contacted the IMO and told the company to wait until after the IMO’s Friday night awards ceremony.

IMO did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

Google isn’t necessarily wrong. It goes through a more formal and rigorous process to achieve a gold medal score, but the discussion may miss a bigger picture. Countries around the world were sent to compete with the brightest students of the year at IMO, scoring only a few percent of them, as were the AI models from Openai and Google.

Openai once had a more important lead than the industry, but that certainly feels like the race is more closely aligned than any company wants to acknowledge. Openai plans to release the GPT-5 in the coming months and wants to reveal the impression that the company is certainly leading the AI industry.