alt Hacker NewsI don't have enough information about the announcement for it to mean much to me. I don't know much about this field of maths. I don't know how many mathematicians were actively working on this problem. It could be zero, which would indicate it's not really that interesting. The article gushes about how it's a Very Important Problem, but it's not even mentioned on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conjectures_by_Paul_Er.... I'm sure the busy folk at openAI will fix that soon however. Furthermore the extensive dishonesty of companies like openAI makes me suspicious of just how this was achieved. Overall the announcement is of little interest to my "priors", although I don't typically think in such terms.
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It is extremely well known. Lots of people have tried to solve it and it stood basically stuck for 80 years. It is getting harder every day to downplay these models.
Given its elementary nature (very easy to state), you can bet that a lot of very bright people have worked on it (I know of one MIT graduate who specialized in Geometry had a lot of interest in it).
You don't have enough knowledge to dismiss them, but you still laugh? For?
The problem was pretty well known, and had many human attempts. There's some room to argue that the right humans hadn't attempted it, as the solution used advanced methods from another field of math. But imho, whereas many prior AI victories could be explained by not enough human attention, there is no such excuse in this case, and one should acknowledge this is a notable achievement.