Anyway, it took multiple tries and, as the article itself states, GPT might have seen a similar function in the training data.
I don't find this trial and error pattern matching with human arbitration very impressive.
I think you are missing the forest in the trees. This is one of the world's leading experts in Quantum Computing, receiving ground breaking technical help, in his field of expertise from a commercially available AI.
The help is not ground breaking. There are decades old theorem prover tactics that are far more impressive, all without AI.
Regardless, his financial considerations are secondary to the fact, AI has rapidly saturated most if not all benchmarks associated with high human intelligence, and are now on the precipice of making significant advances in scientific fields. This post comes after a sequence of the ICPC and IMO both falling to AI.
You are hoping to minimize these advancements because it gives solace to you (us) as humans. If these are "trivial" advancements then perhaps everything will be alright. But frankly, we must be intellectually honest here. AI is soon to be, significantly smarter than even the smartest humans. And we must grapple with those consequences.
It might not be very impressive, but if it allows experts in mathematics and physics to reduce the amount of time it takes them to produce new proofs from 1-2 weeks to 1-2 hours, that's a very meaningful improvement in their productivity.
Finally he's a very principled academic, not some kind of fly by night stock analyst. If you'd been reading his blog a while you'd know the chances of him saying something like this would be vanishingly small, unless it was true.