As for #2, personally I feel like OpenAI's results are superhuman at this point. I don't think there's enough human talent alive right now to produce these sorts of results within a few years, no matter the budget.
There are lots of reasons I believe this. One is that frontier AIs are very clearly superhuman on shorter problems (as can be seen on benchmarks like FrontierMath, or just by playing with them yourself if you have a source for difficult problems)--so these achievements are "just" scaling that advantage to research-sized problems. Second, AI is also clearly superhuman in its knowledge across fields, so it can make connections and combine techniques that humans won't be able to access. Third, these problems are famous and have withstood efforts of many of the best humans, in many cases being considered unapproachable.
Altogether it seems like AI is not only smarter but also more cost efficient that humans for math-adjacemt problem solving. I'm not saying that AI is superior at everything in math, eg theory building, but I think it's really unlikely you could get any group of humans that could compete with OpenAI's latest results.
There are lots of reasons I believe this. One is that frontier AIs are very clearly superhuman on shorter problems (as can be seen on benchmarks like FrontierMath, or just by playing with them yourself if you have a source for difficult problems)--so these achievements are "just" scaling that advantage to research-sized problems. Second, AI is also clearly superhuman in its knowledge across fields, so it can make connections and combine techniques that humans won't be able to access. Third, these problems are famous and have withstood efforts of many of the best humans, in many cases being considered unapproachable.
Altogether it seems like AI is not only smarter but also more cost efficient that humans for math-adjacemt problem solving. I'm not saying that AI is superior at everything in math, eg theory building, but I think it's really unlikely you could get any group of humans that could compete with OpenAI's latest results.