>If a math problem falls in the forest but nobody is around to understand it does it make a sound?
This is not new nor unique. There is plenty of research, especially in math, which can really only be understood by a few people in the entire world. It is not uncommon for a proof to be presented by a mathematician which, initially, is only understood to that mathematician, and it can take a long time for even another mathematician who is an expert in the same field to be able to confidentially say they understood it.
>I saw lots of career research mathematicians say things mostly along the lines of “I don’t understand any of this it’s way over my head”.
This is meaningless in a vacuum. If you give a novel proof in some niche subfield of topology to a competent mathematics researcher who focuses in number theory, they'd say the same thing regardless of if a human or machine wrote the proof. A bunch of "career mathematicians" on Twitter proclaiming this doesn't mean anything other than these people aren't currently equipped to understand the contents of the proofs. That's fine and normal, but the idea that anybody with a PhD in Math should be able to pick up one of these proofs and give it a skim and be able to say, "ahh, yes, quite clever, it seems so obvious in retrospect," is absurd. That's not how this kind of research works.
>Are we ready to just let go of our intellectual faculties and give them to a giant supercomputer nobody understands?
Nobody is blindly accepting these proofs as valid. ChatGPT isn't spitting out a wall of text and proclaiming that they've solved a previously unsolved math problem while everyone is saying, "well if an LLM says it, it must be true!" lol
These proofs are being checked by automated systems (which have been in-use well before LLMs have existed) as well as being checked over by actual experts who are actually capable of (and motivated to) verifying these proofs. But that work still isn't done. There's enough evidence that these companies are confident in saying these proofs are correct, but there's going to be a lot of ongoing work from people to continue to verify and, more importantly, understand these proofs. It's literally some of these people's full-time jobs to do this.
>How do we tell truth from fiction?
When was the last time you verified even a classical, relatively simple mathematical assertion? How often are you just relying on a larger system of experts to ensure that we're not just blindly accepting fiction as truth?
That's not to try to stick it to you personally, but it's just highlight that there's an entire system in-place here that you're not aware of and that you don't have an understanding of that is working just fine including in this context. Real mathematicians aren't going to lazily start letting OpenAI assert whatever they want about their products solving these kinds of problems without heavy scrutiny.