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What is the AIME benchmark?
Last reviewed July 16, 2026
The AIME (American Invitational Mathematics Examination) is a high-school competition exam used to benchmark AI mathematical reasoning: 30 problems per year (two 15-problem papers), each with an integer answer from 0 to 999, demanding multi-step reasoning rather than recall. Because a benchmark year has only 30 problems, each one is worth over 3 percentage points, so small score gaps between models are noise.
Why AIME became an AI benchmark
It is genuinely hard multi-step math with objectively checkable integer answers, refreshed every year, which limits contamination for the newest edition. Reasoning models made it the headline math test: scores that sat in single digits before reasoning-token training now reach most of the paper, so AIME is where that capability jump is most visible.
The small-N caveat
Thirty problems is a tiny sample: one lucky or unlucky problem moves a score by 3.3 points, and run-to-run variance (sampling, retries) adds more. Treat differences under several points as ties, prefer results averaged over multiple runs, and check which year's exam a number refers to before comparing.
Top models on AIME
Full leaderboardPeak scores from the compiled benchmark data; reasoning models use their highest effort tier.
idapt's math rankings include an AIME lane with the exact score per model, and reasoning models show per-effort-tier numbers on their pages: effort visibly moves AIME results.
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