alt Hacker NewsI think we should at least ask the latter, if it turned out it cost $100,000 to generate this solution, I would question the value of it. Erdős problems are usually pure math curiosities AFAIK. They often have no meaningful practical applications.
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Neither does the Collatz conjecture, Fermat's last theorem, ....
(Of course, those problems are on another plane than this one.)
I would question at $60k. At $100k is a steal.
No meaningful, practical applications? You realize that sounds incredibly naive in the history of mathematics, right? People thought this way about number theory in general, and many other things that turned out to have quite important practical applications. Your statement is also a bit odd in that researchers are already paid throughout their whole careers to solve such problems. I don't know.
Also, it's one thing if the AI age means we all have to adopt to using AI as a tool, another thing entirely if it means the only people who can do useful research are the ones with huge budgets.