"Although if no one understands the frontier math (because no one is getting paid to), I'm not sure it even matters what the quality of the cpu math is?"

Presumably AI will be connect the dots to the applications. As the declaration says, this isn't just about math. Human understanding is losing economic value. You can understand stuff on your own time, I guess.

The standard justification for pure math to holders of purse-strings is something like "it might lead to a useful application down the road, like crypto, who knows". That looks pretty inefficient now. We have to entertain the possibility that AI can develop the math needed for any application we put to it. Eg if number theory didn't exist, we could have asked AI for a way to transit messages securely and it would maybe come up with fermats little theorem as part of its solution or maybe come up with an approach we can't conceive of right now seeing as most of us are constrained to available number theory. Like how in the last year when I give an LLM a programming project I see it doesnt even bother with of the many software libraries I and others have written and just codes up the calls it needs on the fly or finds some other ad hoc solution.