> If they were, then their big speed advantage over us would mean that there would be much more of a flood of results.

Is this true right now? Just recently Jarred Sumner tweeted [1] that he managed to make some progress on the Riemann hypothesis while on a jog. Managed to get somewhere by encouraging the llm to “keep going” and “believe in yourself”.

This raised a few questions for me. Had no one at Anthropic thought to try this earlier? It's an interesting footnote that a software engineer there pursued this. How many people in the world can actually verify a proof? How many would we need to sit around and do the right incantations to get a proof out of it? How many would we need to verify and give those proofs value and meaning? What happens when there are more proofs than verifiers? How many will be around in 100 years?

I think it just turns out that a lot this stuff is more socially useful than anything else. The 10 proofs drop came and went in the daily news cycle. Perhaps math is already in it's chess like "for fun" period. I am interested in when we find a very high real-world utility breakthrough math/physics, some space where we've already poured our best human resources at it.

[1] https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2086869681785500011?s=20