AI Masters Math Like Never Before, Scientists Get Digital Research Assistants, and Computer Interfaces Learn to Think

Today's stories explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping both academic pursuits and everyday tools in surprising ways. From small AI models achieving olympiad-level math performance to automated research assistants that could democratize scientific discovery, we're seeing machines develop increasingly sophisticated reasoning abilities that mirror human thought processes - raising both exciting possibilities and important questions about the future of human-machine collaboration. Links to all the papers we discussed: rStar-Math: Small LLMs Can Master Math Reasoning with Self-Evolved Deep Thinking, Towards System 2 Reasoning in LLMs: Learning How to Think With Meta Chain-of-Though, URSA: Understanding and Verifying Chain-of-thought Reasoning in Multimodal Mathematics, Agent Laboratory: Using LLM Agents as Research Assistants, LLM4SR: A Survey on Large Language Models for Scientific Research, InfiGUIAgent: A Multimodal Generalist GUI Agent with Native Reasoning and Reflection