What I've seen appears to indicate some genuinely new approaches by the AI, rather than putting together existing information. That blog post, for example, quotes some running commentary from a mathematician studying the proof of the theorem that she had been working on for years:
It feels like something written by someone who’s on psychedelics. So much unclear and doesn’t make sense. Lots of name dropping of previous work without discussing why it can be used despite impossibility results
Basically the paper is so horribly written that it’s impossible to read it without AI help
I asked Astra for reasonable completeness and soundness claims of the noise gadget and it gave them by combining claims from all over the paper
They also have direct optimal NP hardness of approximation proofs for the main applications of the UGC (Max Cut and all CSP) that bypass the UGC.
The UGC proof invents a completely new bizarre code with a noise test. It’s some crazy recursive construction.
It’s not the long code, not the short code – some alien craziness
I still think that there maybe is a proof that uses the half space code (which is natural)
The citations are often irrelevant and confusing
A possible future is a math world that’s heavenly if you have vision/creative ideas that AI could help check and implement.
And of course there’s a lot for us to learn from the aliens
Note that this particular proof is correct, according to that same mathematician.