Google AI systems make headway with math in progress toward reasoning

By Kenrick Cai

Alphabet's Google unveiled a pair of artificial intelligence systems on Thursday that demonstrated advances in solving complex mathematical problems, a key frontier of generative AI development.

The current class of AI models, which work by statistically predicting the next word, have struggled with abstract math, which requires greater reasoning capabilities resembling human intelligence.

DeepMind, the company's AI unit, published results showing that its new AI models in development, called AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2, solved four out of six questions at the 2024 International Math Olympiad, a prominent competition for high school students.

Google said in a blog post that one question was solved within minutes, but others took up to three days, longer than the competition's time limit. Still, the results represent the best marks in the competition by an AI system to date.

The company said it created AlphaProof, a system focused on reasoning, by combining a version of Gemini, the language model behind its chatbot of the same name, with AlphaZero, another AI system which previously bested humans in board games such as chess and Go. AlphaProof solved three of the competition's problems, including the most difficult question, which was solved by just five out of more than 600 human contestants.

An additional math problem was solved by AlphaGeometry 2.

Reuters reported earlier in July that Microsoft-backed OpenAI was developing reasoning technology under the code name "Strawberry." The project, formerly known as Q*, was considered so much of a breakthrough that several staff researchers wrote a letter to OpenAI's board of directors in November warning that it could threaten humanity, as Reuters first reported.

(Reporting by Kenrick Cai; Editing by Daniel Wallis)