I think "hasn't seen before" is a bit of an overstatement. Sure, the problem is new in the literal sense that it does exist verbatim elsewhere, but arguably, any competition problem is hardly novel: they are all some permutation of problems that exist and have been solved before: pathfinding, optimization, etc. I don't think anyone is pretending to break new scientific ground in 5 hours.
It's not new scientific ground but a machine beating a challenging computer science problem unassisted is a big deal. If they can do that then there are a lot of other challenging things they can do.
Like what exactly? As far as I can tell, the drug discovery is fizzling out, so it's not talked about much. Toxicity, for one, is a big problem, and the AI is not going to tell you whether the new drug it just concocted is suitable for humans or not.
Small model solves an easy problem; big model solves a challenging problem. I wouldn't call those problems; they are more like invented puzzles. Perfect match for the AI marketing department to "solve".
Whatever you say.