> We can also consider the IMO 2025 problems individually. In the Epoch AI newsletter, Greg Burnham combines a subjective analysis with Evan Chen’s MOHS ratings to argue that the first five problems at IMO 2025 were unusually easy and the sixth was unusually hard, so it’s not surprising that the first five problems were exactly the ones solved by these AIs. Though I’m not sure the MOHS scale is rigorous enough to make sense as the x-axis of a bar chart it’s easy to corroborate the high-level story with the official IMO statistics. Based on average scores, this year’s Problem 6 was the fourth hardest and its Problem 3 was by far the easiest of all Problem 3s and 6s since 2000.
In the linked MaxProof paper, in the section "6.3.1. Per-Problem Analysis" it shows the same behavior: 7/7 in the first 5 problems, 0/7 in the last problem.
"I thought it was interesting and a bit underappreciated that the fraction of gold medalists at the 2025 IMO (72/630 = 11.4%) is the highest it’s been since 1981.
Crudely, IMO gold medals are awarded to the highest-scoring 1/12 of contestants.1 However, because scores are integers up to 42 and there’s no provision for tiebreaking, it’s possible for a lot of contestants to be tied around the threshold. In that case, either all of them get a gold medal or none do, and the fraction of gold medalists might deviate substantially from 1/12. That’s what happened this year: 46 contestants all won a gold medal by scoring exactly 35 points.
In fact, bizarrely, 35 is the mode of the scores this year; the last time the modal score was a gold medal score was in 1994. And, of course, 35 is the same score claimed by AI systems from Google, OpenAI, and others."
12.5 million a year for a hundred people seems reasonable? 125k per person per year. GP still said "a few hundred" - two hundred would drop that value to 62.5k per person