The product at the end is important, but so is the process. Few of the things that would happen along the way are happening here, so it's harder to justify the value of the deliverable when there is a failure.

Exactly, the scientific method is what it is for a reason. Sure the institution of academia around it is not perfect, but in general, science, especially general research such as this is not about just bragging about how many papers you have published, it is a process that might help us find out things we might have not known otherwise.

Mathematics is not science.

Most mathematicians don't use gigawatts in a 48 hour window either, so...

LLM power use is primarily during training of the models. So the actual solving of these problems probably didn't use gigawatts