Google, OpenAI Models Win Gold at High School Math Contest
AI just scored a major win at an international math competition.
For the first time, AI models from Google DeepMind and OpenAI achieved gold medal status at the 2025 International Math Olympiad (IMO), a challenging math contest for high school students that has been held annually since 1959. The competition involves two 4.5-hour exams to solve six total problems, without the help of the Internet or external tools.
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The New York Times reports that OpenAI and Google's AI models responded to questions using natural language with no human intervention. Both models were able to solve five of the six problems presented at the 2025 competition within the contest's time restraints, marking the first time AI models have achieved such a level of success.
The two models tied in score, with each earning 35 points out of a possible 42 points on the IMO, exactly at the cutoff point for a gold medal. OpenAI announced the results on Saturday while Google waited until Monday.
Google DeepMind worked with IMO to have its AI system's performance graded and certified by the committee this year, while OpenAI did not formally enter the competition. Instead, OpenAI asked three former IMO medalists to independently grade its AI model's answers to each question, finalizing scores after "unanimous consensus."
According to the Google announcement, only 8% of the high school students who compete in IMO typically receive a gold medal. Google's gold-medal performance this year was one step above its results last year, when its AI received a silver medal, solving four out of the six problems presented in the competition.
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IMO's President, Dr. Gregor Dolinar, called Google DeepMind's solutions this year "astonishing in many respects," while IMO graders found [the solutions] to be "clear, precise, and most of them easy to follow," Dolinar stated.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a post on X on Saturday that while OpenAI does not plan to release an AI model with IMO gold capabilities "for many months," the gold medal was "a significant marker of how far AI has come over the past decade." OpenAI used a general-purpose reasoning system to tackle the competition, not a specialized math system, as the company works towards general intelligence.
we achieved gold medal level performance on the 2025 IMO competition with a general-purpose reasoning system! to emphasize, this is an LLM doing math and not a specific formal math system; it is part of our main push towards general intelligence.
when we first started openai,… https://t.co/X46rspI4l6 — Sam Altman (@sama) July 19, 2025
Meanwhile, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis wrote in a post on X on Monday that Google also used an advanced version of its general-purpose Gemini reasoning model, which will be available "to a set of trusted testers" before rolling it out to Google AI Ultra subscribers, who pay $250 per month for advanced capabilities and 30 TB of storage.
We achieved this year's impressive result using an advanced version of Gemini Deep Think (an enhanced reasoning mode for complex problems). Our model operated end-to-end in natural language, producing rigorous mathematical proofs directly from the official problem descriptions –… — Demis Hassabis (@demishassabis) July 21, 2025
This year, 630 high school students participated in IMO in Queensland, Australia, with 67 students achieving gold medals, per Reuters.
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