Mathematical breakthroughs with commercial relevance are few and far between, and often depend on dusting off old results which were, at the time of discovery, "solutions nobody asked for."

The NS counterxample is actually, by any market measure, a "problem nobody asked for" in the sense that its existence doesn't have any commercial relevance (beyond juicing OpenAI's IPO). So the only long-term value solving it could have is by virtue of whatever reusable theory/insights were generated along the way to the counterexample itself. The letter is absolutely right on that point.

It's not actually clear that those insights will come faster from reverse engineering this LLM proof vs. humans building theory to solve the problem themselves. So what you're saying may or may not even be an efficient way of operating. Also, it implicitly depends on mathematicians to do the hard work of creating problems and then deciphering LLM hieroglyphics for essentially free while the only immediately profitable component gets outsourced to a frontier lab. In what world is that model going to work?

Reading between the lines, it seems like maybe you have a personal grudge for some reason and simply think the technology will advance enough to where we won't need academics at all. But you should say that in the first place.