When you consider the amount of computation which went into this discovery it is less impressive. Like if you spend a lot of fuel you can travel really fast, much faster then a bicyclist. Similarly Go-engines can beat the best humans at go, but they spend several orders of magnitude more energy to do so.
Mathematicians prove or disprove conjectures all the time and use orders of less energy to do so. Using LLMs is kind of just throwing money at the problem and hoping it works. In this case it did. But this is not the most efficient way to do this, and it won‘t scale.
From what I can find AlphaGo Zero runs at ~400 watts, while a human brain uses ~20. So really only about 1 order of magnitude difference.
Of course, training costs are a different question entirely.
That a raw LLM hallucinates?
That we never see all the mistakes and dead ends a complex system using AI hits?
Does it even matter if its accuracy rate across all its experiments is < 100% if it can run trillions of experiments in the same time a human could run 1?
We don't see many of the failed attempts of Human Researchers. Why? Because it doesn't matter.
What amazing here is that it shows our society can make discoveries faster in the post LLM world. Thats incredible.
Your "critique" of how it happened. Not so much.
