OpenAI and Google outdo the mathletes, but not each other

AI models from OpenAI and Google DeepMind achieved gold-medal scores in the 2025 International Math Olympiad (IMO), one of the world’s oldest and most challenging high school-level math competitions, the companies independently announced in recent days.

The results underscore 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 being ahead in the AI race: an intangible battle of “vibes” 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.

Last year, Google scored a silver medal at IMO using a “formal” system, meaning it required humans to translate problems into a machine‑readable format. This year, both OpenAI and Google entered “informal” systems into the competition, which were able to ingest questions and generate proof‑based answers in natural language. Both companies claim their AI models correctly answered five out of six questions on IMO’s test, scoring higher than most high school students and Google’s AI model from last year, without requiring any human-machine translation.

In interviews with TechCrunch, researchers behind OpenAI and Google’s 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 simple math or coding tasks, these systems struggle on tasks with more ambiguous solutions, such as buying a great chair or helping with complex research.

However, Google is raising questions around how OpenAI conducted and announced its gold-medal IMO performance. After all, if you’re going to enter AI models into a math contest for high schoolers, you might as well argue like teenagers.

Shortly after OpenAI announced its feat on Saturday morning, Google DeepMind’s CEO and researchers took to social media to slam OpenAI for announcing its gold medal prematurely — shortly after IMO announced which high schoolers had won the competition on Friday night — and for not having their model’s test officially evaluated by IMO.

Thang Luong, a Google DeepMind senior researcher and lead for the IMO project, told TechCrunch that Google waited to announce its IMO results to respect the students participating in the competition.

Luong said that Google has been working with IMO’s organizers since last year in preparation for the test and wanted to have the IMO president’s blessing and official grading before announcing its official results, which it did on Monday morning.

“The IMO organizers have their grading guideline,” Luong said. “So any evaluation that’s not based on that guideline could not make any claim about gold-medal level [performance].”

Noam Brown, a senior OpenAI researcher who worked on the IMO model, told TechCrunch that IMO reached out to OpenAI a few months ago about participating in a formal math competition, but the ChatGPT-maker declined because it was working on natural language systems that it thought were more worth pursuing. Brown says OpenAI didn’t know IMO was conducting an informal test with Google.

OpenAI says it hired third-party evaluators — three former IMO medalists who understood the grading system — to grade its AI model’s performance. After OpenAI learned of its gold-medal score, Brown said the company reached out to IMO, which then told the company to wait to announce until after IMO’s Friday night award ceremony.

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

Google isn’t necessarily wrong here — it did go through a more official, rigorous process to achieve its gold-medal score — but the debate may miss the bigger picture: AI models from several leading AI labs are improving quickly. Countries from around the world sent their brightest students to compete at IMO this year, and just a few percent of them scored as well as OpenAI and Google’s AI models did.

While OpenAI used to have a significant lead over the industry, it certainly feels as though the race is more closely matched than any company would like to admit. OpenAI is expected to release GPT-5 in the coming months, and the company certainly hopes to give off the impression that it still leads the AI industry.