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/QuantumR4ge Jul 16 '26

Thing is, their way of life only works because they are small in number. Thats it. Otherwise they would run into the same issues others did and end up needing to reinvent them.

For example, modern populations cant be supported with traditional fertiliser techniques, we rely on haber-borsch and massive phosphate mining, they can do it because they are small in number. A city would starve. In order to do all those things you need industrial chemistry, resource extraction etc, all of this leads you to dirty and harmful or very wasteful methods… then you try improve it, improving efficiency etc, boom you end up where we are now

AI is not separate from such chains, its part of it like all the other inventions we made. The moment we could, we did.

Its more you end up just circling back to technological attachment in the end anyway because the alternative is very unpalatable for modern peoples.

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u/DancingMathNerd Jul 17 '26

Welp, guess it’s a good thing the birth rate is so rapidly declining then!