Nous Research just released Nomos 1, an open-source AI that ranks second on the notoriously brutal Putnam math exam

Nous Research, the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence startup, released on Tuesday an open-source mathematical reasoning system called Nomos 1 that achieved near-elite human performance on this year's William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, one of the most prestigious and notoriously difficult undergraduate math contests in the world.

The Putnam is known for its difficulty: While a perfect score is 120, this year's top score was 90, and the median was just 2. Nomos 1, by contrast, scored 87 points — a result that would have ranked second out of 3,988 participants in the 2024 competition, according to the company.

The release marks an inflection point in the rapidly accelerating race to build AI systems capable of sophisticated mathematical reasoning. Unlike the massive, compute-intensive models deployed by major technology companies, Nomos 1 achieves its results with a relatively compact architecture: 30 billion parameters with roughly 3 billion active at any ...