Comment by lexandstuff
4 days ago
I don't fault you for maintaining a healthy scepticism, but per the President of the IMO: "It is very exciting to see progress in the mathematical capabilities of AI models, but we would like to be clear that the IMO cannot validate the methods, including the amount of compute used or whether there was any human involvement, or whether the results can be reproduced. What we can say is that correct mathematical proofs, whether produced by the brightest students or AI models, are valid." [1]
The proofs are correct, and it's very unlikely that IMO problems were leaked ahead of time. So the options for cheating in this circumstance are that a) IMO are colluding with a few researchers at OpenAI for some reason, or b) @alexwei_ solved the problems himself - both seem pretty unlikely to me.
[1] https://imo2025.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/IMO-2025_Closi...
Is b) really that unlikely?
Not really. This whole thing looks like a deliberately planned PR campaign, similar to the o3 demo. OpenAI has enough talented mathematicians. They had enough time to just solve the problems themselves. Alternatively, some participants leaking the questions for a reward isn't very unlikely either, and I definitely wouldn't put it past OpenAI to try something like that. Afterwards, they could secretly give hints or tool access to the model, or simply forge the answers, or keep rerunning the model until it gave out the correct answer. We know from FrontierMath and ARC-AGI that OpenAI can't be trusted when it comes to benchmarks.
Yes
Why?