There's also a difference between important and hard. There are important problems that turn out to be easy, and hard problems that turn out to be useless.
As usual, I think everyone would agree that something like "curing cancer" would be both hard and important!
I think the AI labs' current obsession with showing off mathematical results to uninformed outsiders is a cheap trick. If they were really interested in 'enabling human flourishing' (rather than just wowing, by any means possible, investors with more money than sense), they'd be showing off cures to diseases rather than solving obscure problems in combinatorics only previously considered by three Russians fifty years ago and then declaring that The Singularity is here.