Grant Sanderson on AI and math: IMO gold isn't AGI, but math will be the first field to see superintelligence

Grant Sanderson – AI and the future of math

Grant Sanderson told Dwarkesh why IMO gold didn't turn out to be AGI. Geometry problems get brute-forced in 19 seconds, but combinatorics still trips the models up—the capability frontier is spiky. He pointed out that verifying a conceptual breakthrough can take a century, and even an AI proof of the Riemann hypothesis might be incomprehensible to humans. There's a big overhang in connecting ideas already in the literature, but real-world tasks don't fit neatly into RL environments, and good writing still requires a theory of mind that AI lacks. His advice for students: learning will keep depending on human curation.

Why it matters: Sanderson's breakdown of AI math capability is substantive and counterintuitive — his IMO-gold ≠ AGI prediction has held, and the jagged frontier (geometry solved in 19s, combinatorics still fails) plus century-scale verification cycles are fresh insights. Deduction: this is a...