Getting gold at the IMO or even solving a Millennium Prize problem does not mean an AI can do white-collar work, because mathematics sits at a spiky frontier of AI capability and the rate-limiter for deep mathematical insight (drawing lightning-bolt connections between expert domains or building entirely new mountains of theory) is different from what white-collar work requires.

It's an interesting question because it's hard to answer without knowing what the solution looks like ahead of time. If we take the IMO, the spirit of your question three years ago was in looking at how some of the solutions to these problems really seem to require creativity. The designers of these problems try to come up with things that you can't train for as easily. The dirty secret with the IMO is that you really can train for a lot of them. With the whole AI and math project underway, as you point out, one of the reasons it's interesting at all is that there's a spiky frontier to AI, and math is just right there in one of the spikes. But there's a fractal nature to that spikiness, because when you zoom into the specific progress within math, you have some things that are a lot easier than others. If we focus on the Riemann hypothesis, what would it look like to solve that? These things are extremely good at a specific domain of knowledge, knowing it very deeply, and then knowing another domain, and another. It's bizarre to have something with this superhuman breadth that knows all the fields so well, and yet isn't finding those lightning bolts that connect them. I think we're starting to see sparks of it actually finding connections between the things it's an expert at. If the nature of the solution to the Riemann hypothesis was something like that, that feels pretty distinct to me from what's necessary to get good at white-collar work. If the solution to the Riemann hypothesis involved building a new mountain, that's a kind of skill—the ability to come up with the right new ideas—that feels sufficiently different from the character of how they're intelligent right now. But if it's capable of building mountains that are the correct new theory crystallizing how we should be thinking about a subject, that's just such a level of intelligence that it would be surprising if it didn't permeate into other aspects of the economy besides just the mountain-building for math itself.

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