This is a really weak claim. The evidence they offer is just "someone somewhere says they had a discussion with AI about the topic at some point".
They don't even claim to have had a proof, only to have been working on it.
A lot of math is extremely specialized, to the extent that only a handful of other experts in some field have any experience with those mathematical ideas, with most of them not even yet present in the published literature. It's really not a stretch to claim that it's pretty dubious when the AI decides to use these highly specialized tools after it has trained on chat logs where these techniques were being discussed.
The AI only seem to solve the problems that it had human trading data on…
If this wasn’t human driven, I’d expect to see other problems within that problem. Space solved not just the ones that it had chat data on.
I would say there is a significant difference between AI discovering this completely on its own versus AI creating the finishing connecting part by connecting relevant data. Maybe this claim is too strong, but if part of it is true then the claims that OpenAI have made would be too strong as well.
To me it would feel more like how LLMs seem to work for me personally: incapable of unique work, but very capable of capturing large amounts of data and connecting the dots.