I'm incredibly skeptical about everything these frontier labs put out. Results are results though.

However, could someone with a firmer grasp on the problems weigh in on how much are these recent results are function of cutting a virtually unlimited budget for some very smart people? I believe the LLMs certainly help iterate on ideas faster... but I am aware of very impressive work that goes on in quantitative finance. Stuff that would not really be published. That stuff is the result of paying smart people millions to produce results which produce $$$.

I have to wonder, would this have been solved if we simply gathered tons of smart people and paid them a ton of money to solve it? Or is it exclusively because they had access to LLMs?

Could they have achieved this result with previous versions of ChatGPT?