So the AI didn't prove anything, it offered a hypothesis that wasn't in the published literature, which happened to match what they'd spent years trying to veri

So the AI didn't prove anything, it offered a hypothesis that wasn't in the published literature, which happened to match what they'd spent years trying to verify. I can see how that would look impressive, and he says that if he'd had this hypothesis to start with, it would have saved those years. Without those years spent working the problem, would he have recognized that hypothesis as a valuable road to go down? And wouldn't the years of verifying it still remain?