There are many conjectures that we know are almost surely true, but we don't know why, and explaining why is the main purpose of the mathematician when publishing a proof.

The fact that we don't know why is a clue pointing at some area of math that we haven't discovered yet. The hope is always that it will uncover some hidden fertile valley that will lead to lots of new discoveries. But the proof of the conjecture itself, without understanding, is really not that valuable.

My point is that even if AI discovers many new truths, there's still plenty to do for the mathematical community, in dissecting it and building useful abstractions to understand it, abstractions that can be leveraged for further exploration and uncovering new questions.

Was the term "frontier mathematics" always in use, or did it just become a thing after the advent of contemporary AI?

I think the worry is:

1. People will publish AI generated frontier math making it difficult to identify frontier mathematicians. 2. Trained frontier mathematicians will become scarce

That's also what the gerrymandering discourse is like. Gerrymandering is a threat to civilization because it means political parties will minimize their electoral margins, and because it means politicians will maximize their electoral margins.

You don't think frontier mathematics is already secret?

unfortunately, the worse of both can be true at once.