I for one think understanding more about how the world operates is just about the highest calling possible.
> when AI discovers the cure to cancer or aging etc.
A guy I knew did this. It successfully shrunk cancer tumours in his dog: https://www.the-scientist.com/chatgpt-and-alphafold-help-des...
Graph theory (which the OpenAI math results had many proofs in) is directly applicable to cancer modelling and drug design.
But sure. Novelty crap.
But sure, let me know when they do. I'll be waiting.
I'm not sure how you define "knowing how the world works", but knowing that a very very niche algorithm upper bounds that we thought was x^100 and now we now it's x^99, isn't that interesting. It doesn't really tell us much more about the world and it doesn't have any applications for our day to day lives.
The math in the linked article is understandable by any undergrad in Maths. Hell, I can follow the maths in that paper, so it's nowhere near like the sort of abstruse stuff in the OpenAI maths papers.
And again, if you look at some of the problems in those papers, it's clear they have no practical use to make our world better.
I.e. proving that this problem which we thought would make 1 million years to solve, actually has an upper bound of 999'999 years of time. Ok, cool, very interesting, but actually has zero practical impact on our world.