The whole point of this post was that it's questionable what can be achieved without huge investments into oversight and steering, because navier-stokes was a topic with an unusual level of specification. The problem itself was a specification. Such situations are rare in real-world scenarios.

AI agents are good at solving well-specified tasks, not at solving problems. They do well in fields where the cost/effort of specification is already part of the business.

> The navier-stokes shows us what mathematical problem can be solved when $10m worth of compute is thrown at something.

That's the thing, it very much does NOT show us that. What happened was mathematicians at openAI learned of an imminent development on this problem, and the insight that it entailed, then they were able to prompt a system in the correct direction and spend 20 million dollars to write down the final steps.

Which is rather precisely the point that the article is making!

> If you knew AI could be affordable enough in 3-5 years so that even the most underfunded researchers could use it to solve cancer

As the saying goes, if my grandmother had wheels she would have been a truck.