A new milestone in advanced artificial intelligence reasoning has been achieved as Chinese technology company Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, recently announced that its dots-note 3.0 model scored a perfect 42 points on this year's 67th International Mathematical Olympiad, making it the first AI system in IMO history to achieve both a flawless score and a gold-medal-level result.
The result makes dots-note 3.0 only the second AI model after Google DeepMind's Gemini Deep Think to receive an officially graded gold-level result. Gemini scored 35 points in 2025 after solving five of the six problems, matching that year's gold-medal cutoff.
Unlike many mathematical benchmarks that only ask for a final answer, the IMO requires complete proofs. A solution can lose points if any step is unsupported, making the contest a test of abstract reasoning as well as the consistency of a model's argument.
"Such competitions offer a useful test because the problems are newly written and unavailable online before the event," said Jasper Yao, a research scientist at a major US-based AI laboratory.
As online material can quickly enter model-training data, unseen questions help reveal whether a model can reason beyond material it may have encountered, Yao said, adding: "The value of taking part in a math contest is that it tests how well a model can perform when it has no prior knowledge of the problems and has never seen them before. That is also why major model developers compare their models' mathematical capabilities."
