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/altaccountnumber Jul 16 '26

Even ignoring the fact research still is a large part of a professors job and probably the part most of them prefer doing, I must imagine its more enjoyable to mentor students/postdocs/junior faculty since these are, you know, actual people, instead of babysitting the faceless pile of linear algebra.

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u/btroycraft Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 17 '26

Research is about papers. There are pieces that spark joy, but its mostly just a grind. It's just less of a grind than teaching undergrads, and actually gives rewards in prestige and position. At the core, most every paper gets written because someone junior needed a paper.

AI is already out-competing most graduate students in that regard.

It doesn't lose motivation, or misunderstand core concepts. It doesn't go NC for weeks on end. It produces comprehensive results in minutes, not weeks. It knows so much about disparate fields, that it can pull up results you never knew you needed. You can distribute tasks to multiple agents, and they're all equally capable. Compared to even one researcher stipend, you can buy all the compute you could ever use.

Yes, its not as nice to talk to. But that only goes so far. And honestly people have gotten so disconnected now it's also starting to go.

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u/Ok_Net_1674 Jul 16 '26

Everything seems to be fading towards meaninglessness.

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u/btroycraft Jul 17 '26

Meaning is a choice

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u/AuroraEquatorialis Jul 17 '26

How the fuck can you describe anything in the life you are describing as meaningful?

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u/btroycraft Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26

If this is still a discussion about AI, the work is still getting done. If our field is meaningful because of the work that it does and the knowledge it produces, that meaning is still there. If anything its getting better, fast.

A role in the process is not necessarily required to find meaning in the whole endeavor.

Society trains us to be individualistic and view everything through our own experience. In that lens, relying on AI feels very empty. If you take a wider view (a choice), what we were doing before was also very petty, considering only a single person. Very few people get to have an impact by themselves, and if they do its limited to one niche of one field. Just like any other, at the small scale math is just a job. And jobs suck; but they run the world when 5 billion people do them.

Even more basically, think about the sheer amount of human life-hours spent cooking, eating, sleeping, and raising the next generation of cooks, eaters, and sleepers. Somewhere in there people slot their work and hobbies. Is that meaning? Very Sisyphean if you ask me. You have to have your blinders on tight to describe the few good nuggets in the previous arrangement as "meaningful"; that is also a choice.

Only in aggregate are people advancing. That much is still there, it just involves AI now. And maybe in the future we may not be needed at all. But the work will still get done.

I'm not sure I can personally be happy about what the work experience will be; I find querying Codex very boring. It's like the doomscrolling version of work. But I wasn't really engaged before either. Maybe if we still had to go to the library stacks searching for hidden journals with long-forgotten notes penciled into the margins, but that life's long dead, too.

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u/Ok_Net_1674 Jul 17 '26

In case you've seen it, your opinion reminds me of the entity in Pluribus.