21st July 2025
An AI tool that gets gold on the IMO is obviously immensely impressive. Does it mean math is “solved”? Is an AI-generated proof of the Riemann hypothesis clearly on the horizon? Obviously not.
Worth keeping timescales in mind here: IMO competitors spend an average of 1.5 hrs on each problem. High-quality math research, by contrast, takes month or years.
What are the obstructions to AI performing high-quality autonomous math research? I don’t claim to know for sure, but I think they include many of the same obstructions that prevent it from doing many jobs: Long context, long-term planning, consistency, unclear rewards, lack of training data, etc.
It’s possible that some or all of these will be solved soon (or have been solved) but I think it’s worth being cautious about over-indexing on recent (amazing) progress.
— Daniel Litt, Assistant Professor of mathematics, University of Toronto
Recent articles
- Meta's new model is Muse Spark, and meta.ai chat has some interesting tools - 8th April 2026
- Anthropic's Project Glasswing - restricting Claude Mythos to security researchers - sounds necessary to me - 7th April 2026
- The Axios supply chain attack used individually targeted social engineering - 3rd April 2026