What's more, it's quite possibly one of the best ways to improve AI, as math provides both a large corpus of training data and an objective way to measure capability. IMO this is likely why the AI companies are working on this, with improvement in math reasoning bleeding over into improvement in general reasoning.

Really, mathematicians should be thrilled about this, as this could be the biggest practical payoff of thousands of years of investment in math, bigger even than all the preceding science and engineering payoffs. We're told one of the benefits of a math education is learning how to think; was it really so unpredictable if that also applied to machines? This sort of payoff would justify wide open checkbooks for more math research, even by humans.