This is crazy.
People used to think that 3SUM couldn't be solved in O(n^1.99999), but couple of weeks ago that conjecture was disproven by Anthropic's AI. They also disproved some related conjectures to other similar problems, but importantly they didn't disprove the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH). The conjecture states that no subexponential algorithm for 3SAT exists.
Today, ETH was disproven by openAI. See also this.
There is (was) an entire field of research, called fine grained complexity, that fundamentally is built on these these conjectures. This means that in half a month, an entire field of theoretical computer science has completely collapsed. This has been a funeral for an entire field of science.
The entire reason 3SUM was interesting was because people thought this conjecture to be true. With the conjeture being false, any research that assumed it is basically worthless. People were never interested in finding an algorithm for 3SUM. They just hoped there wasn't one.
A new algorithm for 3SAT is definitely interesting in its own right. But this is not the outcome that anyone had wished for.
Who knows, maybe $$$P = NP$$$.
Auto comment: topic has been updated by pajenegod (previous revision, new revision, compare).
Auto comment: topic has been updated by pajenegod (previous revision, new revision, compare).
Auto comment: topic has been updated by pajenegod (previous revision, new revision, compare).
Not to be a contrarian, but I think the concern that "fine-grained complexity...has completely collapsed" is both too overblown or too narrow.
The bigger concern would be that intellectual work for theoretical computer science could potentially be increasing devalued with the abilities of these models, so that the entire ecosystem of prestigious conferences/publications could collapse (I'm not saying it should/should not, I'm just saying that would be a bigger concern). And let's not even talk about future societal ramifications...
For fine-grained complexity, there is still a number of useful hypotheses, such as the Unique Games Conjecture (or should it now be called the Unique Games Theorem?), which was proven by OAI in the batch that you linked. Others have also mentioned online matrix-vector multiplication and 1-vs-2 cycles problem as examples of assumptions in more specific models.
All of this is to ultimately say yes, I agree with you that this is all crazy.