Did anyone claim that it would be a predictor of solving math problems at a research level? Inasmuch as we can extrapolate from the few words in the article it seems more likely that the researchers working on this project identified some emergent reasoning abilities exemplified with grade level math. Math literacy/ability that is comparable to the 0.1% of humans is not the end goal of OpenAI, "general intelligence" is. I have plenty of people in my social circle who are most certainly "generally intelligent" yet have no hope of attaining those levels of mathematical understanding.

Also note that we don't know if Q* is just a "current LLM" (with some changes)