Oh, look

gold medal-level performance on the world’s most prestigious math competition—the International Math Olympiad (IMO)

Lets be very careful with this very clever deceptive and suggestive wording.

The model “solved” (came up with acceptable solutions) some of the problems and failed on some others. The claim is that this is a gold medal-level performance, as a response to Musk’s claim of a PhD-Level in all fields.

The facts, however, are following:

  • the model was capable o come up with a generated text that human experts accepted as valid answers to mathematically challenging problems, from the set which has been presented at IMO.
  • the model had none (zero, nil) of any kind of understanding of the math, it just generated the most probable next tokens.
  • the observed (by human experts) measured performance (by a total number of correct answers) shows that the training data were excellent, and some RL post-training (tuning) was done right.
  • there are, in principle, no understanding, reasoning or “thinking” whatsoever, all the observable effects are mere very computationally sophisticated illusion, based on basic frequency statistics and conditional probabilities.
  • the claim that if something looks like an intelligence is writes like an intelligence is indeed an intelligence is, of course, bullshit. The analysis of the underlying algorithm (and of the code) is the ultimate reason.

The intentional allegory with the fundamental concept of Ducktyping from classic CS is not incidental, it shows the fallacy of perceiving of a mere appearance as a “real thing” based on flawed (not-applicable in this particular context) reasoning.

The fact that it is capable of spewing out texts with the correct solutions indicates only the facts that the training data and the tuning were good and done right. Period.

There is neither any guarantee of any consistent performance on other problems, nor absence of subtle, hard to detect errors in what appears to be a rigorous mathematical reasoning from the first principles, which is, in fact, only imitation of it (because we know how exactly it writes).

The very same facts apply for any coding problems and “performance”.

Again, the proper (Eastern) philosophy is capable to seeing through the appearance, and not to be fooled to perceive a rope as a snake. And this is a very profound result, indeed.