It is now clear to me why the AI labs are sponsoring these mathathons: https://mathathonchallenge.com/. They are basically crowdsourcing human researcher data to get access to promising directions possibly later to scoop others.

Not so dissimilar to my first comment on this site (which I got piled on): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48959395

Except way more nefarious than I expected