> to hire PhD students and postdocs

Why? I thought we already established* that most professional mathematicians are not necessary (in the near future, then maybe "any"), so why would they doom these students with pity grants to basically create unnecessary jobs for them? More practically, wouldn't that money be best served (i.e., raw ROI) by purchasing more tokens on the frontier models?

(*) The existence of this effort itself is a good heuristic.

Do you consider yourself to be necessary? Like, for mankind? Probably not: you're just one of eight billion nearly-identical people, and if you vanish off the surface of the planet, the economic loss will be basically zero. Heck, if you're of retirement age, you're probably a net burden for the society.

But that doesn't sound like a good argument to ride off into the sunset, right? You probably enjoy living and it does make a difference in the lives of some close friends and relatives?

We don't organize societies around ruthless efficiency optimization, we organize them to be at least somewhat hospitable to humans and human enterprise.