I don't get how this invalidates the gravity of this achievement. Most mathematicians on the frontier of this stuff were likely using AI (or at the very least were heavily computer assisted) for some time now. Navier stokes was one of the very high profile problems that google Deepmind was working on with academia, for example.

Even with many of our best minds working on it for nearly a century, it _just_ now was solved just as AI became very good at math. Doesn't seem too farfetched to me to assume that AI played an outsized role in solving it. If it was really just a matter of "stitching things together" to solve it (granted, this is a very reductive way to look at it) , I suspect we would've solved this a while ago.

There is a certain difference between activating all relevant memoized facts that's in the weights and stringing them together with the help of all the stored text in the world, or displaying genuinely emergent behaviour and generating novel output.

One is really impressive and useful trick, one is AGI.

Apple's research show almost zero emergent behaviour, so I'm inclined to think most of it was already in the weights.

It doesn't take away the usefulness, it just defined the boundary. We can't expect "original research" then because it actually can't reason about concepts that are too far from whats already in the discourse. The discourse is big so we don't notice.