Question: Have you actually used AI to do research-level math? At the current time, it is not "tackle any problem you wish and you can get headline results in ~3 hours." Their method is spraying-and-praying across the entire mathematical frontier, which is something only AI demonstrators are interested in. And as far as I know, they have never elaborated on what their "average of 3 hours" metric even means (e.g. including or excluding all unsuccessful leads?).

I would say no. I am just finishing my MS in applied computational math at Johns Hopkins, but am not specialized to a PhD level.

I suspect the AI frontier labs will also soon turn their tools loose on the entire corpus of historical math papers to check for errors. They'll likely find that some major areas of math are built on a very shaky foundation.

>Have you actually used AI to do research-level math

Being that OpenAI has done most of this on models that are not released, I don't think you have either...

The other thing you're not looking at is mathematics is becoming a means of actual training a model versus just something to try out.

That sounds close to what human researchers do as well. Big part of getting grants/doing graduate work is finding a tractable problem. It requires constant refinement of what the scope and direction of focus.