OpenAI said it, too, had built a system that achieved similar results.

An artificial intelligence system built by Google DeepMind, the tech giant’s primary artificial intelligence lab, has achieved “gold medal” status in the annual International Mathematical Olympiad, a premier math competition for high school students.

It was the first time 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 on Monday.

The news is another sign that leading companies are continuing to improve their A.I. systems in areas like 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 start-up had built technology that achieved a similar score on this year’s questions, though it did not officially enter the competition.

Both systems were chatbots that received and responded to the questions much like humans. Other A.I. systems have participated in the International Mathematical Olympiad, or I.M.O., 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 A.I. boom with the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, the leading chatbots could answer questions, write poetry, summarize news articles, even write a little computer code. But they often struggled with math.

Over the past two years, companies like Google and OpenAI have built A.I. 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 I.M.O., 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 start-up called Harmonic, have built similar systems.

But systems like 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 I.M.O. 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, like OpenAI, Anthropic and China’s DeepSeek, offer similar technologies.

Like other chatbots, a reasoning system initially learns its skills by analyzing enormous amounts of text culled from across the internet. Then it learns additional behavior 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 I.M.O. as human participants did: four and a half 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 $1.5 million in electricity and computing costs to complete the test, according to pricing estimates.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/21/technology/google-ai-international-mathematics-olympiad.html

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5753296&forum_id=2/en-en/#49121245)