OpenAI wins gold at prestigious math competition - why that matters more than you think

OpenAI has achieved a new milestone in the race to build AI models that can reason their way through complex math problems.

On Saturday, the company announced that one of its models achieved gold medal-level performance on the International Math Olympiad (IMO), widely regarded as the most prestigious and difficult math competition in the world. 

We achieved gold medal-level performance 🥇on the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad with a general-purpose reasoning LLM!
Our model solved world-class math problems—at the level of top human contestants. A major milestone for AI and mathematics. https://t.co/u2RlFFavyT

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) July 19, 2025

Critically, the winning model wasn't designed specifically to solve IMO problems, in the way that earlier systems like DeepMind's AlphaGo -- which famously beat the world's leading Go player in 2016 -- were trained on a massive dataset within a very narrow, task-specific domain. Rather, the winner was ...