(Reuters) -Alphabet's Google and OpenAI said their artificial-intelligence models won gold medals at a global mathematics competition, signaling a breakthrough in math capabilities in the race to build powerful systems that can rival human intelligence.

The results marked the first time that AI systems crossed the gold-medal scoring threshold at the International Mathematical Olympiad for high-school students. Both companies' models solved five out of six problems, achieving the result using general-purpose "reasoning" models that processed mathematical concepts using natural language, in contrast to the previous approaches used by AI firms. 

The achievement suggests AI is less than a year away from being used by mathematicians to crack unsolved research problems at the frontier of the field, according to Junehyuk Jung, a math professor at Brown University and visiting researcher in Google's DeepMind AI unit.

"I think the moment we can solve hard reasoning problems in natural language will enable the potential for collaboration between AI and mathematicians," Jung told Reuters.

The same idea can apply to research quandaries in other fields such as physics, said Jung, who won an IMO gold medal as a student in 2003.

Of the 630 students participating in the 66th IMO on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, 67 contestants, or about 11%, achieved gold-medal scores.

Google's DeepMind AI unit last year achieved a silver medal score using AI systems specialized for math. This year, Google used a general-purpose model called Gemini Deep Think, a version of which was previously unveiled at its annual developer conference in May.

Unlike previous AI attempts that relied on formal languages and lengthy computation, Google's approach this year operated entirely in natural language and solved the problems within the official 4.5-hour time limit, the company said in a blog post.

OpenAI, which has its own set of reasoning models, similarly built an experimental version for the competition, according to a post by researcher Alexander Wei on social media platform X. He noted that the company does not plan to release anything with this level of math capability for several months.

This year marked the first time the competition coordinated officially with some AI developers, who have for years used prominent math competitions like IMO to test model capabilities. IMO judges certified the results of those companies, including Google, and asked them to publish results on July 28.

"We respected the IMO Board's original request that all AI labs share their results only after the official results had been verified by independent experts and the students had rightly received the acclamation they deserved," Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said on X on Monday.

However, OpenAI, which did not work with the IMO, self-published its results on Saturday, allowing it to be first among AI firms to claim gold-medal status.

In turn, the competition on Monday allowed cooperating companies to publish results, Gregor Dolinar, president of IMO's board, told Reuters.