Alexander Wei (@alexwei

Alexander Wei

87 posts

Alexander Wei

@alexwei_

Reasoning @OpenAI. Co-built CICERO @MetaAI | @Berkeley_AI PhD '23 | @Harvard '20

San Francisco, CA

Joined March 2022

Pinned
Alexander Wei
@alexwei_
Jul 19, 2025
1/N I’m excited to share that our latest @OpenAI experimental reasoning LLM has achieved a longstanding grand challenge in AI: gold medal-level performance on the world’s most prestigious math competition—the International Math Olympiad (IMO).
5.7M
Alexander Wei
@alexwei_
Feb 12, 2025
o3 x competitive programming update from the OpenAI reasoning team! 🧵 Back in August, we sprinted to prepare o1 to compete in the 2024 International Olympiad in Informatics ...
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Alexander Wei
@alexwei_
Jul 19, 2025
Replying to @alexwei_
8/N Btw, we are releasing GPT-5 soon, and we’re excited for you to try it. But just to be clear: the IMO gold LLM is an experimental research model. We don’t plan to release anything with this level of math capability for several months.
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Alexander Wei
@alexwei_
Jul 22, 2025
On IMO P6 (without going into too much detail about our setup), the model "knew" it didn't have a correct solution. The model knowing when it didn't know was one of the early signs of life that made us excited about the underlying research direction!
Daniel Litt
@littmath
Jul 21, 2025
One piece of info that seems important to me in terms of forecasting usefulness of new AI models for mathematics: did the gold-medal-winning models, which did not solve IMO problem 6, submit incorrect answers for it? 🧵
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Alexander Wei
@alexwei_
Jul 19, 2025
Replying to @alexwei_
5/N Besides the result itself, I am excited about our approach: We reach this capability level not via narrow, task-specific methodology, but by breaking new ground in general-purpose reinforcement learning and test-time compute scaling.
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Alexander Wei
@alexwei_
Jul 19, 2025
Replying to @alexwei_
4/N Second, IMO submissions are hard-to-verify, multi-page proofs. Progress here calls for going beyond the RL paradigm of clear-cut, verifiable rewards. By doing so, we’ve obtained a model that can craft intricate, watertight arguments at the level of human mathematicians.
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Alexander Wei
@alexwei_
Aug 11, 2025
1/ I competed for Team USA at IOI in 2015, so this achievement hits home for me. The biggest highlight: we *did not* train a model specifically for IOI. Our IMO gold model actually set a new state of the art in our internal competitive programming evals. Reasoning generalizes!
Sheryl Hsu
@SherylHsu02
Aug 11, 2025
1/n I’m thrilled to share that our @OpenAI reasoning system scored high enough to achieve gold 🥇🥇 in one of the world’s top programming competitions - the 2025 International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) - placing first among AI participants! 👨‍💻👨‍💻
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Alexander Wei
@alexwei_
Jul 19, 2025
Replying to @alexwei_
2/N We evaluated our models on the 2025 IMO problems under the same rules as human contestants: two 4.5 hour exam sessions, no tools or internet, reading the official problem statements, and writing natural language proofs.
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Alexander Wei
@alexwei_
Jul 19, 2025
Replying to @alexwei_
10/N If you want to take a look, here are the model’s solutions to the 2025 IMO problems! The model solved P1 through P5; it did not produce a solution for P6. (Apologies in advance for its … distinct style—it is very much an experimental model 😅)
GitHub - aw31/openai-imo-2025-proofs
From github.com
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Alexander Wei
@alexwei_
Jul 19, 2025
Replying to @alexwei_
3/N Why is this a big deal? First, IMO problems demand a new level of sustained creative thinking compared to past benchmarks. In reasoning time horizon, we’ve now progressed from GSM8K (~0.1 min for top humans) → MATH benchmark (~1 min) → AIME (~10 mins) → IMO (~100 mins).
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Alexander Wei
@alexwei_
Jul 19, 2025
Replying to @alexwei_
9/N Still—this underscores how fast AI has advanced in recent years. In 2021, my PhD advisor @JacobSteinhardt had me forecast AI math progress by July 2025. I predicted 30% on the MATH benchmark (and thought everyone else was too optimistic). Instead, we have IMO gold.
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Alexander Wei
@alexwei_
Jul 19, 2025
Replying to @alexwei_
6/N In our evaluation, the model solved 5 of the 6 problems on the 2025 IMO. For each problem, three former IMO medalists independently graded the model’s submitted proof, with scores finalized after unanimous consensus. The model earned 35/42 points in total, enough for gold! 🥇
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Alexander Wei
@alexwei_
Jul 19, 2025
Replying to @alexwei_
11/N Lastly, we'd like to congratulate all the participants of the 2025 IMO on their achievement! We are proud to have many past IMO participants at @OpenAI and recognize that these are some of the brightest young minds of the future.
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Alexander Wei
@alexwei_
Jul 19, 2025
Replying to @alexwei_
7/N HUGE congratulations to the team—@SherylHsu02, @polynoamial, and the many giants whose shoulders we stood on—for turning this crazy dream into reality! I am lucky I get to spend late nights and early mornings working alongside the very best.
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