> If the models can do this, they're almost certainly good at just about everything, because the reasoning and creativity required to solve these problems will translate.

The "then" in your "if-then" bears a heavy load. Why would society assign so little economic value to pure mathematics if the skills for proving math theorems translate to massive value in "just about everything"? Would you expect top mathematicians to cure cancer if you transplanted them from the math department to a medical research lab?

Because research mathematics is a subset of all quantitative work that gets done, but it's by far the most technically difficult subset. If the models can handle research grade math and produce ironclad proofs, they can probably handle the quantitative side of just about any discipline in a trustworthy fashion. Think about how many dinky spreadsheets have gone on to become critical tooling for large organizations. Even if you consider that many disciplines hide technically demanding work behind tooling (e.g. essentially no one is writing a stiffness matrix FE routine by hand), this model would be capable of writing a direct competitor from scratch to produce the same result.

All of STEM relies on mathematical analysis, and new models are now superhuman at that. And yeah, I'd go a step further and say that the reasoning and creativity required to solve cutting edge math problems probably does translate to other tasks like interpretation of the law, or medical diagnosis, or accounting, etc., for the same reasons that I think most top tier mathematicians would excel at those tasks were they so inclined.

Do you think mathematicians are not already working on cancer research? There's quite a bit of heavy math in biostatistics, medical imaging, machine learning, etc.

I'd assume that the majority of people who study math take their skills and move onto some related STEM career that isn't pure math. Academia is incredibly small and competitive.

That sort of worked for Eric Lander but as he moved higher up in the bureaucracy, he found himself suddenly having to manage people who weren't nerds like him. He was bad at that had to step down.

American mathematician Jim Simons was worth some $31 billion at the time of his death in 2024. The lack of economic value in pure math doesn't mean that applied math is of little value. Physicists and mathematicians with PhDs "sell out" to join Wall Street as quants and make a killing there, Jane Street is full of them.