Explainer: K2 & Math Olympiad Golds

Feeling behind? Makes sense, AI moves fast. This post will catch you up.
The year of agents
First of all, yes, ‘25 is the year of agents. Not because we’ve achieved agents, but because we haven’t. It wouldn’t be worth talking about if we were already there. But there’s been a ton of measurable progress toward agents.
Timeline
The last 6 months:
- Jan 20: DeepSeek R1 launched — Open source thinking model, performing near SOTA at the time
- Feb 2: Deep Research launched — An agent that uses tools
- Feb 19: Grok 3 — a huge 2T+ model, the first
- March 26: OpenAI adopts MCP — MCP starts to become mainstream
- April 16: o3 & o4-mini — First notable “agentic” models available in an API
- April 29: The sycophancy epidemic in GPT-4o
- April 30: DeepSeek Prover — Trained to use an...