New Delhi, Aug. 25 -- When ChatGPT first appeared in late 2022, it could charm us with words but stumbled with numbers. It could draft a sonnet in the style of Shakespeare but might guess wildly if asked to multiply 17 by 24. Two years plus later, the tables have turned. Last month, Google's Gemini Deep Think and an experimental OpenAI model won gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad, solving five of six problems and matching the scores of the world's brightest teenage prodigies. Days later, Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro topped India's famously tough IIT Joint Entrance Examination.

These headlines are striking not just because machines can now ace exams designed to pick the top one in a thousand students, but because AI has acq...