Definition
Plain language
A famously hard high school math competition used to test AI math reasoning.
As stated in the literature
The American Invitational Mathematics Examination, used as a stress-test benchmark for advanced mathematical reasoning in language models.
Why it matters: It's become a standard yardstick for whether a frontier model can do genuine multi-step mathematical reasoning, not just pattern-match.
For example, AIME problems include short numerical-answer questions like 'find the smallest positive integer such that...' that take human contestants real work to solve.
Heard on the show
“The first is AIME — the math olympiad.”Episode 013 — Why Search Keeps Rediscovering the Same Workflow, and What That Means