This is what really made me think to my self, "holy shit". I can't believe not more people are noticing and talking about this. Unless perhaps they didn't actually read the README, and are just talking about what they heard from someone who also didn't read it?
People don't believe this because it's false, those 3 hours are just the last session connecting all the dots. They've tried a lot more, probably thousands of hours, in total.
Honestly? I don't think so. If anything I think they would obscure this using averages (e.g., maybe they solved some hundred problems and the easy ones took a few minutes and the hard ones took a couple of days), but if they have a model that's as good at math as they are as coding I don't see why it'd be impossible.
I think novel mathematics is intrinsically harder than coding (much in the way that computer science research is harder than coding), but the models are scary good at coding.
