To give some context:
Kakeya / local smoothing (math): The result would resolve the Kakeya conjecture and Stein’s restriction conjecture across all dimensions together. Mathematicians had been making progress one dimension at a time, so this would settle a whole family of central harmonic analysis problems at once.
ETH is false (computer science): ETH has been used as a computational hardness premise in hundreds of papers, so a disproof would undercut a large body of existing complexity results. It would also change what researchers think is achievable for efficient computation.
QCD existence (physics): It would give a rigorous mathematical foundation to the theory of the strong force, which physicists have used for decades without proving it’s well-defined. It also bears on a Millennium Prize Problem.
Is there any obvious path from these results to any sort of physics, chemistry, or biology breakthrough? From what I can tell: no (but I lack the physics and chemistry expertise to say anything about the QCD finding).
Turning the question arouhnd: what would be the most impactful thing for OpenAI or Anthropic to do to show large breakthroughs?
I would guess ETH has been assumed in thousands of papers. I have several myself.
On the positive side, suddenly there's a whole bunch of open problems!