I think "importance" here is just being rated as 1 to 4 stars. So it's not "second-most important" but rather "one of the top 5 most important". That doesn't change much, but FWIW.

This doesn't contradict anything he said though. People on HN care only because an LLM proved a very difficult conjecture, not because we are independently interested in this conjecture.

Don’t bother. This is the third or fourth time AI has solved an open conjecture, and once again the comment sections everywhere are full of people explaining how this doesn’t really matter at all, how it’s an irrelevant, obscure problem, how any mediocre grad student could probably have solved it if only they had bothered to try, and how of course, human mathematicians will still be vastly superior to machines 100 years from now because they have that magic spark for which nobody can say what it supposedly consists of.

These discussions have nothing to do with mathematics, and everything to do with ego and fear. I’ve never been less impressed with humans than since AI started challenging them.

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