Hey readers,

It's Dylan Matthews here. High school academic competitions provide a level of emotion and drama that I have yet to see matched in my adult life. Case in point: the blowup around this year’s International Math Olympiad.

The IMO is an uber-competitive global contest where countries send teams of six students, who have two days and nine total hours to complete six brutally difficult problems. While the problems can’t require calculus, in practice they often touch on areas of math not covered in high school. Many IMO stars have gone on to become eminent mathematicians or other scientists; the youngest-ever gold medalist, Terence Tao, is widely regarded as the greatest mathematician now living.

For years, “can it get an IMO Gold Medal?” has been considered an important and very difficult benchmark for advanced AI systems. In 2022, the eminent AI researcher (and Future Perfect 50 honoree) Paul Christiano predicted there was only an 8 percent chance of an AI winning a gold by the end of 2025. Then last year, Google DeepMind announced one of their AIs had gotten a silver medal and it appeared only a matter of time before gold was in reach.

Sure enough, on Saturday a researcher at OpenAI announced that one of their experimental models had achieved gold at this year’s IMO. But there’s a catch.

DeepMind also had a model take gold, as Google announced on Monday. DeepMind had worked with the competition, which set formal rules to make sure that the AIs were subject to the same constraints as students (for instance, only working for nine hours) and asked AI partners to delay their announcements so as not to step on the achievements of the kids competing. OpenAI didn’t work with the IMO (and so we can’t be sure it obeyed the same constraints as DeepMind’s) and announced before the teenage human IMO gold medal winners even had their celebration party.

Basically it seems like what happened is that OpenAI had its own IMO effort, declined to subject itself to the IMO’s actual rules, and, upon realizing that DeepMind also hit the gold benchmark, announced their gold over the weekend to scoop the competition, even if it meant raining on some teens’ parade. I will leave “what does this tell us about OpenAI and the moral character of the people running it?” as an exercise for the reader. 

ICYMI:

with Bryan Walsh

Title: Senior editorial director
What I cover: This whole place. Also, I write the weekly Good News newsletter.
Fave dish lately: Whatever my 8-year-old son will agree to eat.

There’s a new Terminator in town — and he’s Swedish. Alexander Skarsgård stars as the titular Murderbot in the dystopian sci-fi Apple TV show of the same name, which just wrapped up its first (or only) season this month. The premise: in a far future where humans have spread out into space but live under the domination of all-powerful corporations — I know, stretches credulity — human-seeming robots are manufactured to provide security on off-world colonies.

They’re supposed to follow orders without questions, but surprise, Skarsgård’s bot manages to hack his controls, putting himself on a path to becoming a real boy with the help of a rag-tag polycule of bleeding-heart space scientists.

After 10 episodes, I’m not actually sure Murderbot is any good, but I haven’t been able to get this T2 meets Pinocchio story out of my head. The special effects are also great, especially whatever they used to fit the skyscraper-sized Skarsgård in the same frame as his co-stars. 

Reader question:

Can you explain how US government subsidies support the animal agriculture industry and why they are the way they are? 

You can think about governmental support for animal agriculture in three main buckets: direct subsidies, indirect subsidies, and deregulation.

Direct subsidies are exactly what they sound like: money given directly to farmers. The biggest source of direct subsidies is subsidized crop insurance, which helps to keep the price of animal feed — namely corn and soybeans — artificially low. This is important because feed is a big part of a livestock producer's expenditures.

There are other forms of subsidies, like conservation programs, in which the government pays farmers to adopt practices intended to benefit the environment. Some of this is legitimate, while some funds factory farm infrastructure projects. Livestock producers are also compensated for animals lost to wildlife predation and bird flu outbreaks.

Farmers also benefit from a lot of indirect subsidies. For example, schools must offer cow’s milk to students, which has been a literal cash cow for the industry, making up about 8 percent of its annual revenue. The US government also buys a lot of food — $9.1 billion in 2021 — for places like food banks, federal building cafeterias, and military bases, and it highly favors animal protein over plant protein in that purchasing.

The US government is a major funder of agricultural scientific research, and one peer-reviewed analysis found that from 2014 to 2020, the meat and dairy industries received 800 times more in public funding than the alternative protein sector.

Finally, there’s deregulation, which I’d argue is the most beneficial subsidy. Farms are exempt from the Animal Welfare Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act, among other federal laws — and many state laws, too. If these applied to farmers, their production costs would shoot up.

Why are things this way? There’s no simple answer, but I think some of it can be attributed to the simple fact that as countries get richer, they eat more meat, and governments craft policy to accelerate that dietary shift. Agribusiness has also been highly effective at shaping farm and food policy through lobbying and electoral politics.

To dig deeper into deregulation, check out my explainer on agricultural exceptionalism. 

⭐ ONE WAY TO DO GOOD THIS WEEK

The US destroyed 500 tons of taxpayer-funded emergency food last week, a direct result of the Trump administration’s gutting of USAID. That’s about a week’s worth of wasted food for 1.5 million children at a time when extreme hunger is rising sharply in places like Sudan and Gaza.

Millions of dollars worth of grains, cooking oil, and high-energy biscuits contracted by USAID are also at risk of spoiling soon. Even if donors can’t fully pick up the tab, they can help make sure that more emergency food gets where it needs to go. You can donate to the Rhode Island-based nonprofit Edesia Nutrition’s campaign to keep manufacturing its high-energy food aid here.  — Sara Herschander, Future Perfect fellow

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