International Mathematical Olympiad
also referred to as: imo
13 statements across 5 episodes · 5 bullish · 1 bearish · 5 people on the record · first statement Nov 11, 2024 by Stanislas Polu · said 67 times in 13 episodes since 2024 · across every show →
Mentions by year
brought up most by Yi Tay (8), Shawn Wang (6), Carina Hong (6), Dr. Jasper Zhang (2), Simon Eskildsen (1), Pratyush Maini (1), Kevin Weil (1), Greg Brockman (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 30 mentions in 7 episodes 4 per episode
- Captaining IMO Gold, Deep Think, On-Policy RL, Feeling the AGI in Singapore — Yi Tay
- Scaling Past Informal AI - Carina Hong, Axiom Math
- The AI Frontier: from Gemini 3 Deep Think distilling to Flash — Jeff Dean
- Cooking with OpenAI’s Research Chief: AGI, o1, Evals, and Scaling Laws — Mark Chen
- Retrieval After RAG: Hybrid Search, Agents, and Database Design — Simon Eskildsen of Turbopuffer
- ⚡️ Reverse Engineering OpenAI's Training Data — Pratyush Maini, Datology
- ⚡️ Prism: OpenAI's LaTeX "Cursor for Scientists" — Kevin Weil & Victor Powell, OpenAI for Science
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 33 mentions in 4 episodes 8 per episode
- ⚡️Math Olympiad gold medalist explains OpenAI and Google DeepMind IMO Gold Performances
- Greg Brockman on OpenAI's Road to AGI
- [State of RL/Reasoning] IMO/IOI Gold, OpenAI o3/GPT-5, and Cursor Composer — Ashvin Nair, Cursor
- Long Live Context Engineering - with Jeff Huber of Chroma
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
Everything said about International Mathematical Olympiad, oldest first
Nov 11, 2024 neutral
Polu: DeepMind IMO breakthrough relied on scaling RL and autoformalization
“I think the DeepMind team just did a good job of scaling. I think there's nothing too magical in their approach, even if it hasn't been published as a Dan Silver talk from seven days ago, where it goes a little bit into more details. It feels like there's noth…”
Jul 24, 2025 neutral
Jul 24, 2025 positive
Jul 24, 2025 negative
Competition math benchmarks test only a narrow slice of mathematical ability
“Most of the benchmark that people are using right now is, like, AME, IMO, USAMO, all these, like, competition math problems, but, like, they're, they just test, like, a certain aspect of other math skills that a mathematician have”
Jul 24, 2025 neutral
The IMO tests structured logic rather than mathematical research creativity
“IMO kind of like, it's a good exam to test certain aspect of math skills, which is like problem solving, or you need to have like really complete chain of thoughts. Like, logic, et cetera, but it doesn't test, like, your creativity in terms of, like, research.…”
Jul 24, 2025 neutral
Qualifying for China's math olympiad team is harder than winning IMO gold
“In terms of difficulty CMO is kind of similar to IMO. I would say it's super competitive in China. So there is a saying, like, if you get, it's harder to get selected for the national, to become the national team instead of then like getting, getting the gold …”
Jul 24, 2025 positive
DeepMind and OpenAI eliminated formal Lean translation for 2025 IMO solutions
“What surprised me is this time they don't use formal language, but instead they just use LM. And so last year when they tried to do the IMO, they need like a like a human to kind of translate the natural language. Problems to Lean, and then they use Lean to ki…”
Aug 15, 2025
Jan 23, 2026 neutral
DeepMind Shipped Full Gemini IMO Config Only to Select Mathematicians
“So the inference time config was like the one serve to most people is different, but And the full IMO, like, inference config was presented, like, shipped to some mathematicians just because of the inference cost, right? But that was good enough to be a genera…”
Jan 23, 2026 bullish
Jan 23, 2026 bullish
Jan 23, 2026 neutral