Google had remained quiet after OpenAI had announced two days ago that one of its internal models had managed a gold-level performance at the International Mathematics Olympiad as per its own internal testing, but Google now seems to be speaking up after its gold medal performance was ratified by the organizers.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has said that they didn’t declare their gold-medal performance at the IMO in keeping with the wishes of the organizers. This seemed to be a dig at OpenAI, which based on internal testing alone had declared that one of its models had delivered a gold-medal performance.
“We didn’t announce (the results) on Friday because we respected the IMO Board’s original request that all AI labs share their results only after the official results had been verified by independent experts & the students had rightly received the acclamation they deserved,” Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis posted on X.
“We’ve now been given permission to share our results and are pleased to have been part of the inaugural cohort to have our model results officially graded and certified by IMO coordinators and experts, receiving the first official gold-level performance grading for an AI system!” he added.
There had been rumours on X that OpenAI had announced its internal results despite directives from the International Mathematics Olympiad against doing so. “According to a friend, the IMO asked AI companies not to steal the spotlight from kids and to wait a week after the closing ceremony to announce results. OpenAI announced the results BEFORE the closing ceremony,” wrote Mikhail Samin on X, who runs the AI Governance and Safety Institute.
“According to a Coordinator on Problem 6, the one problem OpenAI couldn’t solve, “the general sense of the IMO Jury and Coordinators is that it was rude and inappropriate” for OpenAI to do this,” he added. “OpenAI wasn’t one of the AI companies that cooperated with the IMO on testing their models, so unlike the likely upcoming Google DeepMind results, we can’t even be sure OpenAI’s “gold medal” is legit. Still, the IMO organizers directly asked OpenAI not to announce their results immediately after the olympiad. Sadly, OpenAI desires hype and clout a lot more than it cares about letting these incredibly smart kids celebrate their achievement, and so they announced the results yesterday,” he said.
In response, OpenAI’s Noam Brown had said that while they hadn’t been in touch with the organizers of the International Mathematics Olympiad, they’d let them know of their model’s performance before announcing it on X. The organizers reportedly told them to wait until the students winners had been announced, which they claimed they did.
But now with Google getting an official gold medal performance that is ratified by the event’s organizers, OpenAI’s declaration of a gold-medal winning performance feels premature — and even slightly desperate. OpenAI had claimed that one of its models delivered a gold-medal performance, while its answers had not been evaluated by IMO officials. Google DeepMind, on the other hand, has managed to legitimately deliver a gold medal performance on a test that was conducted, evaluated and ratified by the IMO. OpenAI has been having a difficult time in recent months, with Grok4 overshadowing its top models, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2 allegedly delaying its open-source model release, and Meta poaching at least 10 of its researchers. And this latest incident shows that OpenAI might have gotten a bit ahead of itself — only to be upstaged by Google DeepMind — while trying to announce a major milestone in the AI model world.