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by algorithms432 339 days ago
Well, they deliberately ignored the requests of IMO organizers to not publish AI results for some time (a week?) to not steal the spotlight from the actual participants, so clearly this announcement's purpose is creating hype. Makes me lean more towards the "totally grifting" scenario.
2 comments

Amazing. Stealing the spotlight from High School students is really quite something.

I'm glad that Tao has caught on. As an academic it is easy to assume integrity from others but there is no such thing in software big business.

> As an academic it is easy to assume integrity from others

I'm not an academic, but from the outside looking in on academia I don't think academics should be so quick to assume integrity either

There seems to be a lot of perverse incentives in academia to cheat, cut corners, publish at all costs, etc

The source of this claim is a tweet.[1] The tweet screencaps a mathematician who says they talked to an IMO board member who told them "it was the general sense of the Jury and Coordinators that it's rude and inappropriate for AI developers to make announcements about their IMO performances too close to the IMO." This has now morphed into "OpenAI deliberately ignored the requests of IMO organizers to not publish AI results for some time."

[1] https://x.com/Mihonarium/status/1946880931723194389

The very tweet you're referencing: "Still, the IMO organizers directly asked OpenAI not to announce their results immediately after the olympiad."

(Also, here is the source of the screencap: https://leanprover.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/219941-Mach... )

The tweet is not an accurate summary of the original post. The person who said they talked to the organizer did not say that. And now we are relying on a tweet from a person who said they talked to a person who said they talked to an organizer. Quite a game of telephone, and yet you're presenting it as some established truth.
"According to a friend, the IMO asked AI companies not to steal the spotlight from kids and to wait a week after the closing ceremony to announce results." I don't see much reason for the poster to lie here. It also aligns with with what the people on the leanprover forum are saying, and, most importantly, with DeepMind not announcing their results yet. Edit: multiple other AI research labs have also claimed that IMO asked them to not announce their results for some time (i.e. https://x.com/HarmonicMath/status/1947023450578763991 )