The speaker describes an approximately tenfold year-over-year increase in the difficulty of mathematical tasks models could handle, measured by the time a human mathematician would take to complete them.

“And so every year you're seeing this like 10x increase in the tasks they're able to do in terms of like length of how long it would take a human mathematician to do it. And then it was very sensible that a year later we get to IMO gold because that's 100 minutes. That's about how long it takes a human mathematician.”