Comment by rakejake

OAI started working on this only after they found out it was close to being solved. They threw a team of researchers who spent sleepless nights + a ton of compute. This is not exactly healthy academic competition - it's like if you spend a year hunting for oil fields and finally find a very promising area to be explored, only to find that Exxon tapped their entire exploration unit to go all in and and find it overnight just to stake claim to the discovery. Tao said it right - math should not be treated as a non-renewable resource to be mined.