I for one think understanding more about how the world operates is just about the highest calling possible.
> when AI discovers the cure to cancer or aging etc.
A guy I knew did this. It successfully shrunk cancer tumours in his dog: https://www.the-scientist.com/chatgpt-and-alphafold-help-des...
Graph theory (which the OpenAI math results had many proofs in) is directly applicable to cancer modelling and drug design.
But sure. Novelty crap.
But sure, let me know when they do. I'll be waiting.
I'm not sure how you define "knowing how the world works", but knowing that a very very niche algorithm upper bounds that we thought was x^100 and now we now it's x^99, isn't that interesting. It doesn't really tell us much more about the world and it doesn't have any applications for our day to day lives.