They are problems humans couldn't solve given the level of interest and investment they had. You can believe the LLMs made it viable to solve them cheaply, that's the narrative they are selling, but I think it is not unreasonable to point out the companies are willing to burn way more money than the problems have been considered "worth" historically solving them to advertise their LLMs.

One of the headlines was applying an already-known enigma machine algorithm to a single message nobody had figured out the key for. Neat result, but could have been solved by a focused human without much effort.