A defining memory from my senior year of high school was a nine-hour math exam with just six questions. Six of the top scorers won slots on the U.S. team for the International Math Olympiad (IMO), the world’s longest running math competition for high school students. I didn’t make the cut, but became a tenured mathematics professor anyway.

This year’s olympiad, held last month on Australia’s Sunshine Coast, had an unusual sideshow. While 110 students from around the world went to work on complex math problems using pen and paper, several AI companies quietly tested new models in development on a computerized approximation of the exam. Right after the closing ceremonies, OpenAI and later Google DeepMind announced that their models earned (unofficial) gold medals for solving five of the

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