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BIZ & FINANCE WEDNESDAY | JULY 23, 2025

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Humans outscore AI at top international maths contest

UK borrowing rises as inflation drives up debt, adding to Reeves’ challenges LONDON: Britain borrowed more than expected in June as a jump in inflation pushed up the government’s debt costs, adding to speculation about the need for new tax hikes by finance minister Rachel Reeves later this year. Public sector net borrowing totalled £20.7 billion (RM118 billion) last month, official data showed yesterday, above a median forecast of £16.5 billion in a Reuters poll of economists, and the second highest amount for June on record. The borrowing was also bigger than expected by Britain’s budget watchdog, which forecast June borrowing of £17.1 billion when it published its outlook in March. Since then, a strong inflation reading in April had the effect of pushing up inflation-linked government bond payments. Yesterday’s data from the Office for National Statistics showed the government’s debt interest bill was £16.4 billion in June, the third highest since records began in 1997. Having pushed up taxes by the most in decades last year, Reeves is expected to raise them again in a budget statement towards the end of 2025 in order to remain on track to meet her own targets for fixing the public finances. That job was made harder this month when the government dropped its plans to reduce the welfare bill in the face of stiff opposition within the ruling Labour Party. Slow economic growth is also adding to Reeves’ problems. She has said she will balance day to-day spending with tax revenues by the end of the decade. The latest ONS data showed the current budget was in deficit by £44.5 billion in the first three months of the financial year that began in April – £5 billion more than expected by the Office for Budget Responsibility watchdog. “There is no denying that fiscal developments have been very disappointing so far this financial year and Rachel Reeves will almost certainly be investigating potential revenue raising measures,“ said Philip Shaw, chief UK economist at Investec. Reeves will probably need to raise taxes by £20 billion – about half the size of last year’s package – with future increases in defence spending only likely to add to the bill further ahead, said Rob Wood, chief UK economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. Darren Jones, a deputy to Reeves at the Treasury, said the government remained committed to its fiscal rules. Over the first three months of the fiscal year which began in April, Britain borrowed £57.8 billion, 15% more than in the same period last year and the third-highest April-to-June deficit on record. The figure was back in line with the year-to-date forecast by the OBR, whose projections underpin the government’s tax and spending plans, after two months of lower-than expected borrowing by the government. – Reuters

them easy to follow.” Around 10% human contestants won gold-level medals, and five received perfect scores of 42 points. US ChatGPT maker OpenAI said that its experimental reasoning model had scored a gold-level 35 points on the test. The result “achieved a longstanding grand challenge in AI” at “the world’s most prestigious math competition”, OpenAI researcher Alexander Wei wrote on social media. of

score at last year’s IMO in the British city of Bath, solving four of the six problems. That took two to three days of computation – far longer than this year, when its Gemini model solved the problems within the 4.5-hour time limit, it said. The IMO said tech companies had “privately tested closed-source AI models on this year’s problems”, the same ones faced by 641 competing students from 112 countries.

o Google and OpenAI achieve breakthroughs in machine learning, with models hitting gold level scores for the first time

SYDNEY: Humans beat generative AI models made by Google and OpenAI at a top international mathematics competition, despite the programmes reaching gold-level scores for the first time. Neither model scored full marks – unlike five young people at the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), a prestigious annual competition where participants must be under 20 years old. Google said Monday that an WASHINGTON: AstraZeneca plans to spend US$50 billion (RM212 billion) to expand manufacturing and research capabilities in the US by 2030, it said on Monday, the latest big investment by a pharmaceutical company reacting to President Donald Trump’s tariff policy. The investment will fund a new drug manufacturing facility in Virginia and expand research and development (R&D) and cell therapy manufacturing in Maryland, Massachusetts, California, Indiana and Texas, it said in a statement. It will also upgrade the Anglo Swedish drugmaker’s US clinical trial supply network and support ongoing investment in novel medicines.

advanced version of its Gemini chatbot had solved five out of the six maths problems set at the IMO, held in Australia’s Queensland this month.

“We can confirm that Google DeepMind has reached the much desired milestone, earning 35 out of a possible 42 points – a gold medal score,” the US tech giant cited IMO president Gregor Dolinar as saying. “Their solutions were astonishing in many respects. IMO graders found them to be clear, precise and most of AstraZeneca plans US$50b US move amid tariff threat “It is very exciting to see progress in the mathematical capabilities of AI models,” said IMO president Dolinar. Contest organisers could not verify how much computing power had been used by the AI models or whether there had been human involvement, he cautioned. – AFP “We evaluated our models on the 2025 IMO problems under the same rules as human contestants,” he said. “For each problem, three former IMO medalists independently graded the model’s submitted proof.” Google achieved a silver-medal

Trump has called on pharma companies to make more of the medicines they sell in the US within the country, rather than importing active ingredients or finished medicines. He is also pushing for prices in the US to fall to what other countries pay. CEO Pascal Soriot announced the plans in Washington, saying he believes that drug prices need to rise elsewhere and “equalize” with other countries effectively contributing more to research and development costs. “The US cannot build or carry the cost of R&D for the entire world,“ he said. US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s department is leading a

On Monday, AstraZeneca said the expansion supports its ambition to reach US$80 billion in annual revenue by 2030, with half coming from the US. The US accounted for more than 40% of AstraZeneca’s annual revenue in 2024, and the company had been prioritising the market – the world’s largest, worth US$635 billion – before Trump’s return to office. The move to scale up its US footprint is the latest by a drugmaker as Trump threatens to impose import tariffs on the industry and seeks to boost domestic manufacturing. The sector has historically been spared from trade disputes.

probe into pharmaceutical imports that could pave the way for new tariffs. “For decades Americans have been reliant on foreign supply of key pharmaceutical products. President Trump and our nation’s new tariff policies are focused on ending this structural weakness,“ said Lutnick in a statement issued by AstraZeneca. While Trump has repeatedly threatened tariffs on the sector, he signalled earlier this month that companies would be given a year to 18 months to “get their act together” before any levies take effect. The company said that the timing and location of the announcement was linked to the US policy environment, though some of the spending would have occurred regardless so that the infrastructure for future medicines was in place. The pledge is in addition to the US$3.5 billion in investments the company announced in November 2024, the statement said. The US$50 billion pledge matches the commitment announced by Swiss rival Roche in April and follows new spending plans unveiled this year by Eli Lilly & Co, Johnson & Johnson , Novartis, and Sanofi. Also present at the announcement was Virginia State Governor Glenn Youngkin, a vocal Trump ally who has defended the administration’s tariff policies. The new Virginia facility – the company’s largest single manufacturing investment – will produce active ingredients for AstraZeneca’s experimental weight loss medicines, including its oral GLP-1 candidate and an oral PCSK9 inhibitor for cholesterol management, it said. The company said the investment could create tens of thousands of new jobs, but declined to give specifics. It employs about 18,000 people in the US and has a global workforce of about 90,000. – Reuters

Pharma group announces major investment in Virginia, Maryland, Texas, and Massachusetts, creating tens of thousands of jobs. – UNSPLASH PIX