Google Wants Superintelligent AI. First It Has to Beat Teen Math Prodigies
At the International Math Olympiad, Google’s AI joined hundreds of humans working through problems designed to stump even the brightest minds.
Illustration: Isabella Cotier for Bloomberg
While 630 young math prodigies were sitting in a conference room on Australia’s sunshine coast, readying their pencils for the International Math Olympiad, a potential rival was still en route from the Brisbane airport: a team from Google, with an AI model tuned specifically to complex math.
For months, the Googlers had been training a variant of the company’s Gemini large language model, DeepThink, to solve Olympiad problems. For DeepMind, the contest was more than a chance to beat smart teens — in fact, the team winces at the suggestion that they’re in competition. Instead, it’s about taking a step on the path to a theoretical milestone known as “artificial general intelligence,” the point at which AI could be relied upon to think like a human, and be trusted with all sorts of tasks.