According to GIMPS, this is the first time a prime number was not found by an ordinary PC, but rather a “‘cloud supercomputer’ spanning 17 countries” that utilized an Nvidia A100 GPU chip to make the initial diagnosis. The primary architect of this find is Luke Durant, who worked at Nvidia as a software engineer for 11 years
Primes are actually useful…
Cryptography is moving away from primes. Given the theoretical danger of quantum computer over them.
Latices is what will theoretically used in the future for cryptography.