It's very possible I'm wrong. I think that what we're seeing in maths is that RL is training LLMs to solved well-posed problems, especially when they can recruit existing ideas from across the literature. I don't want to discount that - it's clearly powerful as we've seen in maths. But in fuzzier research fields, the right question is often more important than the solution - I'm not convinced LLMs are there yet, and I don't think this problem is as amenable to RL as problem-solving.

This recent work which tried to get LLMs to reinvent methods they haven't seen before (given the same problem setting) also raised some of the same issues I've noticed in my own usage: https://epoch.ai/publications/innovationeval