I don't see how AI in maths stops anyone from pursuing any sort of intellectual learning themselves.

In the same way children still learn their times tables even though calculators can do the job better.

To me (and most normal people) knowledge pursuit is about inspiring others with discovery and the intellectual joy of doing something yourself.

I disagree, for a lot of people knowledge pursuit is about the knowledge and the results of that knowledge. IE the end result is what matters.

As a simple example, Pythagoras's theorum is useful to lots of people all over the world as in the actual equation. I'm not sure most for most people that the knowledge that Pythagoras himself went through an intellectual journey to discover the theorum is more important than the equation itself.

If we use a thought experiment to say that instead of Pythagoras discovering the theorum it was actually discovered by artificial intelligence do you think most people would care? I would say not.

I think a lot of people like the idea of being at the forefront of their field and their intellectual contributions being able to push the frontier foreward. If AI simply gets good enough to largely absorb the frontier they don't find as much fun in rediscovering what AI has already discovered. People forget however, this has already happened to many fields, chess being one example.

Whether AI gets there with maths is an open question but to say AI has no value in maths whatsoever is to say that the practical implications of a better understanding of maths that AI could potentially give us is worth nothing.