A glimpse into OpenAI’s largest ambitions

As Will points out, there were two recent wins for OpenAI in its efforts to build AI that outcompetes humans. Its models took second place at a top-level coding competition and—alongside those from Google DeepMind—achieved gold-medal-level results in the 2025 International Math Olympiad.

People who believe that AI doesn’t pose genuine competition to human-level intelligence might actually take some comfort in that. AI is good at the mathematical and analytical, which are on full display in olympiads and coding competitions. That doesn’t mean it’s any good at grappling with the messiness of human emotions, making hard decisions, or creating art that resonates with anyone.

But that distinction—between machine-like reasoning and the ability to think creatively—is not one OpenAI’s heads of research are inclined to make.

“We’re talking about programming and math here,” said Pachocki. “But it’s really about creativity, coming up with novel ideas, connecting ideas from different places.”

That’s why, the researchers say, these testing grounds for AI will produce models that have an increasing ability to reason like a person, one of the most important goals OpenAI is working toward. Reasoning models break problems down into more discrete steps, but even the best have limited ability to chain pieces of information together and approach problems logically.

OpenAI is throwing a massive amount of money and talent at that problem not because its researchers think it will result in higher scores at math contests, but because they believe it will allow their AI models to come closer to human intelligence.