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AI models from OpenAI<\/a> and Google DeepMind<\/a> achieved gold medal scores in the 2025 International Math Olympiad (IMO), one of the world\u2019s oldest and most challenging high school level math competitions, the companies independently announced in recent days.<\/p>\n The result underscores just how fast AI systems are advancing, and yet, how evenly matched Google and OpenAI seem to be in the AI race. AI companies are competing fiercely for the public perception of behind ahead in the AI race: an intangible battle of \u201cvibes\u201d that can have big implications for securing top AI talent. A lot of AI researchers come from backgrounds in competitive math, so benchmarks like IMO mean more than others.<\/p>\n Last year, Google scored a silver medal at IMO<\/a> using a \u201cformal\u201d system, meaning it required humans to translate problems into a machine\u2011readable format. This year, both OpenAI and Google entered \u201cinformal\u201d systems into the competition, which were able to ingest questions and generate proof\u2011based answers in natural language. Both companies claim their AI models scored higher than most high school students and Google\u2019s AI model from last year, without requiring any human-machine translation.<\/p>\n In interviews with TechCrunch, researchers behind OpenAI and Google\u2019s IMO efforts claimed that these gold medal performances represent breakthroughs around AI reasoning models in non-verifiable domains. While AI reasoning models tend to do well on questions with straightforward answers, such as math or coding tasks, these systems struggle on tasks with more ambiguous solutions, such as buying a great chair or helping with complex research.<\/p>\n However, Google is raising questions around how OpenAI conducted and announced its gold medal IMO performance. After all, if you\u2019re going to enter AI models into a math contest for high schoolers, you might as well argue like teenagers.<\/p>\n Shortly after OpenAI announced its feat on Saturday morning, Google DeepMind\u2019s CEO <\/a>and researchers took to social media to slam OpenAI for announcing its gold\u2011medal prematurely <\/a>\u2014 shortly after IMO announced which high schoolers had won the competition on Friday night \u2014 and for not having their model\u2019s test officially evaluated by IMO. <\/p>\n