It's newsworthy because it's a milestone. It was something no human was able to do (despite trying very hard), but a machine did. Humans have written lots of interesting blog posts.
The idea that mathematics has rejected any notion of utility is absurd. It's not like topics get picked at random. Conjectures like this are interesting because they are a test of our understanding. The problem sounds easy, but apparently was quite hard.
Isn't that a straightforward argument for preserving the status quo as much as possible in learning? We know how to get people to learn without AI, so we should keep doing it until someone figures out how to use AI effectively.
This is not at all what happened. They did deliver, in the form of the "Attention Is All You Need" paper, which Google made public. They took nothing from Google that wasn't already public.
Unless you think that employees are like indentured servants, and Novo Nordisk owns not only Wegovy but the people who work on it.
Semiclassical gravity is the best we can currently do for a theory of gravity without invoking speculative ideas that are currently untestable. If the paper holds up (I haven't read it), then there are several possibilities:
1. Maybe P = NP, and semiclassical gravity isn't special.
2. Maybe P = NP, and the way we'll prove it is finding an efficient way to simulate semiclassical gravity.
3. P = NP is a hypothesis about traditional theories of computation, but they don't rule out that we can build a special machine that solves them. There's a stronger hypothesis, the extended Church-Turing thesis (ECTT), that says this is impossible. Maybe the extended Church-Turing thesis is wrong, and this is how we'll show it.
4. If ECTT thesis is right, then maybe we can conduct an experiment where semiclassical gravity fails. This gives us a clue to new physics.
5. If we can't eventually conduct an experiment, then at least we learn about a new angle on complexity -- problems that can be efficiently solved this way but not by a deterministic Turing machine.
Both quantum mechanics and general relativity are thought to satisfy the ECTT, so the fact that our most experimentally successful combination of the two doesn't is of some interest. (Semiclassical gravity is thought to fail eventually, but in a way that's out of reach of current experiments.)
Half the countries in Europe has their own Trump-equivalent politician heading one of the largest parties, and yet Europeans are imagining it's something happening "in the US" while they sleepwalk into disaster.
You're not understanding my point. The scientific evidence is that birds are descended from dinosaurs. Scientific evidence can't make birds be dinosaurs, because it's up to us to define "bird" and "dinosaur", and we can define "bird" to exclude dinosaur (and I think most people still do). Just like we can define "fish" and "human", and we can define "fish" to exclude human, even though some fish learned how to walk on land and one of their grandkids is typing this comment right now. Biologists might wish that we all adopt cladistic definitions for types of organisms, but that doesn't the world will follow.
We don't "know" that, because that's not a category of thing we can know or not know. It's a matter of semantics of whether we consider birds dinosaurs, just like it's a matter of semantics of whether we consider people a kind of fish.
The idea that birds are descended from dinosaurs is nearly as old as evolution itself, first being proposed by Thomas Huxley in 1868 (Origin of the Species dates from 1859).
The only reason there was a competing evolutionary theory is because it was erroneously thought that birds have a clavicle and dinosaurs don't, so instead it was proposed that birds and dinosaurs have a common ancestor, and that dinosaurs lost the clavicle. Now that they have excavated many more bones paleontologists have since discovered therapod clavicles.
If it was the professor, then that would be very embarassing on his or her part.