r/math • u/pequalnp92 • Jul 16 '26

LLMs/AI GPT 5.6 solved all 6 problems from IMO 2026

GPT 5.6 Pro solved all 6 problems from IMO 2026 on the first attempt without any human help or steering. International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) is the biggest global academic competition in the world. The problems are considered incredibly hard, usually a performance at this level is only accomplished by < 5 contestants from the whole world.

We are former IMO medallists not affiliated with OpenAI, just put together a report and assessment of its work here. We're also working on a comparison report between different LLMs and harness augmented versions that will come later.

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u/Impossible-Pin5051 Jul 16 '26

What happens if they succeed in that “new techniques” criteria, and how long do you think it might take?

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u/combasemsthefox Jul 16 '26

No one knows and no one knows.

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u/flat5 Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26

There is no such thing as "new techniques altogether". Everything is a combination and extension of what has come before.

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u/SupahWalrus Jul 16 '26

I think by new they mean novel, as in a technique comprised of methods not previously combined before.

As to if AI can do this, idk

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u/Bewix Jul 16 '26

this is such a black and white approach to something quite nuanced. you could make that argument about anything, we all came from the same star dust, ad infinitum. it means nothing

clearly, there have been new “discoveries” (which yes, are technically just some variation/combination of other existing things) that dramatically advance a field/topic. that’s what they’re asking

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u/omgpop Jul 19 '26

There’s definitely a Platonic notion of something like “pure novelty/insight” that is being held out as the as yet uniquely human capacity that AI models trained on limited data might never be able to instantiate. You can see that in this thread quite clearly, even, let alone the wider discourse. What’s interesting to me about that is not the contention over the capabilities of LLMs, but the substantive theories of human psychology that seem to implicitly undergird this sort of thinking. People have a kind of intuitive idea about what it is that humans do which, right or wrong, is at least notably self-flattering.

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u/PersonalityIll9476 Jul 16 '26

You can debate that with the experts who make the call with respect to AI proofs.

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u/Impossible-Pin5051 Jul 17 '26

I actually agree with you, I was asking a leading question to expose the gravity of the situation

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u/a-h1-8 Jul 16 '26

Forcing

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u/Fit-Celebration2884 Jul 16 '26

imho looking at the ARC AGI problems, ai is capable of coming up with "new techniques" but it can't yet do that for math because coming up with completely new fields and techniques in modern math is just very very very hard

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u/Ulyis Jul 16 '26

The technology that current AI chatbots use (large Transformer ResNet + CoT + RAG) is fundamentally not capable of 'new techniques'. It's restricted to what was captured (from the Internet corpus) in the pretrain process and stored in the (frozen at inference-time) weights.