@tao@mathstodon.xyz These companies are taking advantage of the structure of the modern mathematical enterprise. The field has become so specialized that mathematicians in one area many times cannot understand the problems or progress in other related areas. So to emphasize the importance of problems, conjectures are made, some even with prizes attached. Conjectures with many implications (even if most mathematicians cannot understand those implications) or formulated by the most famous mathematicians become more well-known (for example, the Millenium problems were curated by a small group of elite mathematicians). Long open conjectures can also achieve prestige. Solving such a conjecture then becomes prestigious because of expert opinions that the conjecture is significant, rather than for its own sake. So the AI companies are now taking advantage of this situation by pursuing the solution of these famous conjectures or problems. Compare, for example, to protein folding, which was “solved” by Deep Mind’s AlphaFold. This is a biological chemistry problem that can be appreciated by a large swath of the population (still, it requires some education to appreciate, but not a graduate degree in a specialized field of mathematics).