In your mind does this mean that they are lying, or driven by motivated reasoning and cognitive bias, or whatever you'd like to say?

Because I feel like people bring up these facts as a way to discount everything that these people are saying, but whether or not they've chosen to align themselves with AI aligned venture capital funding or not. The question is really, did what they say is happening happen or not? Are these capabilities real or not?

To my mind, mathematics is pretty definitely, externally, objectively verifiable, so it would be easy to catch them in a lie. In the case of the Erdös problem that was recently solved in a novel and productive way, it wasn't even initiated by them and the chat GPT transcript is public for all to see. And the proof could easily be verified by other people, for instance.

In addition, I think it's unlikely that they're not explaining things as they honestly see them and also doing their due diligence to make sure that they are seeing them as close to correctly as possible. Because their positions with these organizations not to mention their entire reputation and life's work and passion depends on their reputation in academic mathematics. If they were to give that up by falsifying these claims or not verifying them sufficiently, they would lose everything.

I think it's also worth pointing out that it is totally possible for someone to align themselves with such organizations after the fact because they agree with them instead of being bought out by such organizations. Otherwise, it would be possible to dismiss the opinion of anyone working at any NGO dedicated to being against AI and denying AI's capabilities or whatever, as well by the same logic of their salary being paid by an organization dedicated to pushing those ideas.