Interesting that the physics result is not released yet. From the limited wordings, “unified completion of the Standard Model of particle physics” is probably SU(5), which is experimentally disproved as one describing our universe. So the wording sounds a bit confusing, ie they are not proving or discovering Grand Unified Theory (GUT), and there’s no Higgs. So it is not really the standard model, but models that’s closely related to that. It is still an impressive result. IMO at the level of the recent quasi Riemann hypothesis level result, shy of getting the millennium prize (no mass gap) but is actually a very meaningful result, both of which arguably more impactful that the one they solved a millennium prize problem (Navier–Stokes).
More comments in https://blog.kolen.dev/link/openai-shepherds
100 years of so close yet so far, although satisfying, would be humbling if a GUT was finally discovered not by humans.