How a reasoning model cracked an 80-year-old math problem - Episode 20

Hello, I'm Andrew Main and welcome to the OpenAI Podcast. On today's episode, we're speaking with Alexander Wei, Hung Xing Wu and Li Jie Chen from the reasoning research team behind a recent math breakthrough from an OpenAI model. They'll tell us the story behind the discovery and what stood out to them about the reaction.

Everyone had a hard time sleeping because it's so exciting.

This model is something that's really amazing.

I mean, this is something that can be published the best journal of math.

Maybe this is one in 100 times where it's too good to be true, but it's actually true.

Lijay, tell me what you work on.

Oh, I work on reasoning with Alex.

Okay. How did you find your way into reasoning?

Last summer, Alex had this breakthrough in like IOI and IMO. You know, I used to be a participant in IOI. Okay. And then I was like, oh, that's crazy. You know, Model can already win medals gold medals. At that time, I was a professor assistant professor at UC Berkeley. But then I'm thinking, like, maybe I should try to rethink my career. It seems like making the model smarter will maybe have some bigger impact on the world. And then I just kind of had a conversation with Alex back in last October. And then I got super excited about this thing. And eventually, I just joined OpenAI.