but the researchers were also largely relying on AI
If I write a book and pass it through a spelling and polish checker, I still wrote the book and its core IP. I didn’t “rely on” the tool to create the IP.
A better example would be playing chess against a player slightly stronger than me and using a chess computer to suggest some good moves. I could win, but it certianly wouldn't be just my brain that wins. It would be an amalgamation of my brain with a machine that suggests good moves.
One cannot simply reason by analogy.
My iPhone keyboard does
This likely doesn't happen exactly on an analog keyboard, but then many text-processing environments that do the same thing in post. My keyboard just edited 'yuor' to 'your' even though I successfully input the prior string.
Professor says the assistants - why don't you dig in this direction, I have a hunch it might produce something valuable. And AI assistant does just that, proving or disproving a hunch. This would take the professor a lot of time if doing by themselves.
The OpenAI effort was a pure brute force attempt. I'm not even sure an LLM was actually involved. I think they just used their hardware to run the matrix multiplies required by the search for a counter example. Perhaps some clever approach guided the search but that seems to be about it.