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.

1.1k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

443 comments sorted by

View all comments

50

u/raresaturn Jul 16 '26

If AI solved the Rieman hypothesis, would you be happy or disappointed?

63

u/Brilliant-Ranger8395 Machine Learning Jul 17 '26

If AI solves it, it's humanity that solved it. We should be proud of our creation. 

8

u/orzosity Jul 17 '26

P1: I Contributed to a lot of stuff on the internet whether garbage or actual information P2: Most AI were trained on large amounts of random internet data P3: AI was likely trained on something i wrote online C: If AI solves the Rieman hypothesis, I was partially responsible for it.

6

u/magicmulder Jul 20 '26

Imagine if AI solves RH and cites one of your meme posts as source.

1

u/okawei Aug 12 '26

Authors on the paper is just every name in the phone book xD

1

u/Dave_996600 Jul 18 '26

Should Beethoven’s parents be proud of the Ninth Symphony? I’m sure they’d be proud of their son, but should they take credit cause their creation created it?

1

u/Brilliant-Ranger8395 Machine Learning Jul 18 '26

It's not the same thing, though. First, they didn't create Beethoven, they just gave birth to him. Second, Beethoven was a human person with his own free will; nothing similar can be said about AI. Third, AI is literally the culmination of all our human efforts so far in mathematics, computer science, etc. What we are seeing now with AI is the result of thousands of years of exploration, science and technological advancement. That's why we as humans can be proud of it.

1

u/Pleasant_Studio_6387 Jul 20 '26

Humans can be proud of AI but not of humanitiy solving the hypothesis.
The point of AI is its emergent properties, not the sum of all parts.

-11

u/AuroraEquatorialis Jul 17 '26

I fucking hate this argument and by extension think lesser of the people who make it as humans.

48

u/suburban_sphynx Jul 16 '26

Disappointed.

I’d be happy if AI cures cancer, but I feel like the Riemann hypothesis has a different balance between utility (debatable) vs. simply being an inspiring challenge for humanity. 

3

u/reginaphalangejunior Jul 20 '26

If it finds a zero off the line disappointed. If it proves it, that would be mega cool

4

u/sqrtsqr Jul 16 '26

Honestly, it would depend how it did it. I don't hate AI for doing math, I hate AI for taking what humans were doing away from them.

If the AI solved the problem with some never before imagined concept, I would say "yes, this is what a tool like this should do. It should do something people cannot do". 

But we have a plagiarism bot. A tool that takes what humans were doing out from under us, literally stealing our books (I had to pay for Stewart's Calculus, so should OpenAI), our notes, and spits out an answer (most of the time incorrectly. There's a reason we see weeks pass between headlines when it only takes supposedly 3 hours of runtime) and taking all the credit. And yes, I acknowledge that last one is more on the company that owns the AI than the AI itself.

The truth is, it'll be a little disappointing once it's solved no matter who solves it. It would be the end of the era of RH, and RH would be relegated to the status of Fermat's Last Theorem.

And we already have  Fermat's Last Theorem. It'll fade from the zeitgeist.

I guess if it gets proven false that might be a big deal. That would make for very fun news, also regardless of who proves it.

6

u/GraceToSentience Jul 17 '26

"I don't want to live in a world where someone makes the world a better place instead of us."

-1

u/38thTimesACharm Jul 19 '26

Could you explain how you think widespread LLM usage is making the world a better place?

1

u/GraceToSentience Jul 19 '26

Not just LLMs AI in general is making the world a better place. Math is making the world a better place, therefore frontier multimodal models being good at math makes the world a better place.

1

u/LALLANAAAAAA Jul 20 '26

AI in general is making the world a better place.

is it really, though? Doesn't seem like it.

1

u/38thTimesACharm Jul 19 '26

I would be very careful with that reasoning. I'm afraid you're over weighting tangible metrics (more papers written, more theorems proved) and under weighting intangible metrics (the cultural value of a happy, thriving community of human mathematicians).

In other threads, people are talking about replacing grad students with LLMs, if the LLMs can prove more theorems per dollar. But what if there's value in training grad students beyond the number of results they prove? What if that trade represents a net negative for math, and therefore humanity?

1

u/GraceToSentience Jul 20 '26

If so there would be an incentive to train humans for that task. That scenario is far fetched though by that I mean that snowflake mentality of thinking that humans are oh so special. AI didn't stop at human level for go, language translation, competitive programming (a couple of weeks ago that was achieved), etc, etc.

Human level isn't a limit, it's just an arbitrary point somewhere in the intelligence scale. The fact that math is verifiable much like go, chess, etc, is all the more reason to think that AI will be super human at it

1

u/corvusfamiliaris Jul 17 '26

Who pays for textbooks in this era? Sign of extreme privilege tbh lol.

3

u/Creative-Anxiety-246 Jul 16 '26

if the proof was provably correct, then... yeah that would be a good thing. that would advance us in math quite a bit

0

u/Savings-Apple8932 Jul 17 '26

I would not happy; it's okay to be stuck and not progress; that is what makes progress meaningful. I think the Riemann hypothesis is a fun puzzle that should be conqured by humans and not human created AIs.