alt Hacker NewsYou can use that retroactive logic about any hard problem though. Unsolved murder cases, math, theoretical physics.
If tons of smart humans try for years and fail and then an LLM tries for a few weeks or hours and succeeds, the implications are clear. And these are by far the dumbest LLMs will ever be.
The retrospective view is important, though. In retrospect, these problems weren't that hard. (The unit distance graph problem was the hardest.) There are some problems that still seem hard, even when we know the answer. Nobody thinks that Fermat's last theorem is easy, even though now know it to be true.
Before AI, it was pretty rare that a problem that turned to be unexpectedly easy, so mathematicians thought they were pretty good judges of it. (The last pre-AI example I can remember is the Gaussian correlation conjecture.) So thanks to AI we have learned that we were overconfident in our ability to judge difficulty.
If a truly major problem falls, like the Riemann hypothesis, and the proof turns out to be 10 pages, then the lesson will be a different one -- mathematicians are bad at math, and they should turn to more natural domains for them, like folding and putting away towels.