Google and OpenAI announced that their artificial intelligence models had won gold medals in a global mathematics competition. This is seen as an effort to create powerful systems that can match human intelligence.

According to the results, AI systems achieved the gold medal for the first time at the high school International Mathematical Olympiad.

In contrast to the earlier methods employed by AI corporations, the models of both organizations were able to solve five of the six challenges. This was accomplished by utilizing general-purpose "reasoning" models that processed mathematical concepts using normal language.

Junehyuk Jung, a math professor at Brown University and visiting researcher in Google's DeepMind AI unit, said the accomplishment indicates that mathematicians will be using AI in less than a year to solve unresolved research challenges at the forefront of the discipline.

"I believe that the possibility of cooperation between mathematicians and AI will be made possible once we are able to solve challenging reasoning problems in natural language," Jung told Reuters.

This achievement was made possible by a new experimental model developed by OpenAI that focused on significantly scaling up "test-time compute." This was accomplished by letting the model "think" for extended periods of time and using parallel computing capacity to execute multiple lines of reasoning at once, according to OpenAI researcher Noam Brown. OpenAI's cost in terms of processing power was not disclosed by Brown, but he described it as "very expensive."

For researchers at OpenAI, it is yet another obvious indication that AI models are capable of sophisticated reasoning that may extend beyond mathematics.

Google researchers share this optimism, believing that the skills of AI models may be applied to explore problems in other domains, like physics, according to Jung, who in 2003 earned an IMO gold medal as a student.

At the 66th IMO on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, 67 competitors, or almost 11% of the 630 pupils, won gold medals.

Using math-specific AI algorithms, Google's DeepMind AI unit won a silver medal last year. Google employed a general-purpose model this year called Gemini Deep Think, which was first introduced at its yearly developer conference in May.

In an interview conducted during the closing ceremony on Saturday, OpenAI, which first declared gold-medal status and released its results on Saturday, stated that it had received approval from an IMO board member to do so.

On Monday, IMO board president Gregor Dolinar told Reuters that the competition permitted cooperating firms to release their results.