Seyoon Ragavan

See eccc.weizmann.ac.il/report/2026/02… for more! Hoping to see more ideas from cryptography shed light on catalytic computing. (5/5)

Why MVCs and why the bizarre specifications for Computer C? High-level answer: compared with RM codes, MVCs require fewer servers (enabling our memory reduction) but are otherwise less efficient (hence the need for the large catalytic hard drive). (4/5)

Alexandra Henzinger, Ted Pyne and I recently resolved the below question (picture by Gemini), building on landmark results by James Cook, @ian_mertz and @rrwilliams. The starting point was a new connection to private information retrieval (PIR), a problem from cryptography. (1/5)

Chevignard et al show residues also reduce the qubit cost of quantum attacks on elliptic curves: eprint.iacr.org/2026/280 The space savings is less dramatic than for factoring (1.6x instead of 6x), and they again pay a big gate count penalty (256x), but very interesting.

Can you encrypt a program to hide its inner workings while still enabling others to use it? This problem of "program obfuscation" is central to cryptography. To learn more, see this article! It also touches on a paper by myself, @NeekonV, and @Vinod_MIT from TCC 2024.

Chevignard's QIP2025 talk on reducing the space cost of quantum factoring: youtube.com/watch?v=R3yM_5… And her co-author Schrottenloher's talk at the Simons Summer Cluster on Quantum Computing: youtube.com/watch?v=0pnXpd…

@demishassabis @lmthang Consulting a couple of individual coordinators/graders for verification is very different from having submissions graded through channels endorsed by all official personnel including those who led the IMO problem setting and coordination.

@demishassabis @lmthang I was at the IMO as a coordinator/grader, and I don't think it's fair to say that Gemini's solutions were "officially graded".

Official results are in - Gemini achieved gold-medal level in the International Mathematical Olympiad! 🏆 An advanced version was able to solve 5 out of 6 problems. Incredible progress - huge congrats to @lmthang and the team! deepmind.google/discover/blog/…

Everyone's talking about AI performance on the IMO. Let me highlight 🇨🇦Canadian 11th grader Warren Bei🇨🇦, one of five participants with a *perfect* 42/42. This is his *fifth* (and final) IMO representing Canada, with three golds and two silvers. (➡️ MIT undergrad in the fall)

🚨 According to a friend, the IMO asked AI companies not to steal the spotlight from kids and to wait a week after the closing ceremony to announce results. OpenAI announced the results BEFORE the closing ceremony. According to a Coordinator on Problem 6, the one problem OpenAI couldn't solve, "the general sense of the IMO Jury and Coordinators is that it was rude and inappropriate" for OpenAI to do this. OpenAI wasn't one of the AI companies that cooperated with the IMO on testing their models, so unlike the likely upcoming Google DeepMind results, we can't even be sure OpenAI's "gold medal" is legit. Still, the IMO organizers directly asked OpenAI not to announce their results immediately after the olympiad. Sadly, OpenAI desires hype and clout a lot more than it cares about letting these incredibly smart kids celebrate their achievement, and so they announced the results yesterday.

A nice article about some recent work by @greg_k_m, @Vinod_MIT, Katherine Van Kirk, and myself on quantum advantage via factoring! Thanks to Lakshmi for writing this.

#primeministerlive How was the adjustment to life after being PM, and what do you have planned for the coming years?