The two big discoveries both came from the negligible handful of mathematicians working at OpenAI/Anthropic in spite of many orders of magnitude more mathematicians using them outside of the companies. I don't see any way to explain this without assuming that the limiting factor is the ability to burn a few rainforests worth of tokens in pursuit of something publishable.

I think it would also explain their opacity towards the process. Being able to solve such well known problems in a nice replicable 1-2-3 way would be far more effective marketing than their complete opacity outside of the result, which suggests that they feel transparency is not in their best interest for some reason.