o1-preview was released 1 year 10 months ago btw. makes me think the lifespan of some open problems is partly a function of compute. the important detail here is that finding these ten solutions took roughly $2k of inference.

human mathematicians have always worked under tiny search budgets, forcing them to discard unlikely directions early. models can keep thousands of low-probability paths alive until one yields a proof or insight. as compute scales, the set of economically discoverable ideas expands.