[jug]

1. OpenAI researchers used loaded and emotional words, implying shock or surprise. It's not easy to impress an OpenAI researcher like this, and above all, they understand the difficulty difference between teaching AI grade school and complex math since many years. They also understand that solving math with any form of reliability is only an emergent property in quite advanced LLM's.

2. Often, research is made on toy models and if this would be such a model, acing grade school problems (as per the article) would be quite impressive to say the least as this ability simply isn't emergent early in current LLM's.

What I think might have happened here is a step forward in AI capacity that has surprised researchers not because it is able to do things it couldn't at all do before, but how _early_ it is able to do so.