Non-OpenAI pre-RLVR chatbots might serve as an anchor for how long it takes an AI company to turn an algorithmic idea into a frontier model, after it becomes a clearly worthwhile thing to do. Arguably only Anthropic managed to catch up to OpenAI, and it took them 1.5 years with Sonnet 3.5. Even Google never caught up after 2+ years, their first credibly frontier chatbot is Gemini 2.5 Pro, which is already well into RLVR (and similarly for Grok 4). So it seems reasonable to expect that it would take about 2 years for RLVR-based models to start being done well, somewhere in 2026-2027.
The IMO results probably indicate something about the current lower bound on capabilities in principle, for informally graded tasks such as natural language proofs. This is a lot higher than what finds practical use so far, and improvements in 2026-2027 might be able to capture this kind of thing (without needing the scale of 2026 compute).
Non-OpenAI pre-RLVR chatbots might serve as an anchor for how long it takes an AI company to turn an algorithmic idea into a frontier model, after it becomes a clearly worthwhile thing to do. Arguably only Anthropic managed to catch up to OpenAI, and it took them 1.5 years with Sonnet 3.5. Even Google never caught up after 2+ years, their first credibly frontier chatbot is Gemini 2.5 Pro, which is already well into RLVR (and similarly for Grok 4). So it seems reasonable to expect that it would take about 2 years for RLVR-based models to start being done well, somewhere in 2026-2027.
The IMO results probably indicate something about the current lower bound on capabilities in principle, for informally graded tasks such as natural language proofs. This is a lot higher than what finds practical use so far, and improvements in 2026-2027 might be able to capture this kind of thing (without needing the scale of 2026 compute).