The EFF Cooperative Computing Awards, which pay out money for (four specific sizes of) prime records, were meant to show off how the Internet is useful for letting people who don't even know each other work together to solve problems. They were established back in 1998, when people in general were much less familiar with the Internet and its impact. That specific contest isn't set up to go on forever, as it ends when a billion-digit prime is discovered.

The search for different kinds of mathematical objects sometimes has applications and sometimes doesn't. For example, apparently the search for Golomb rulers (another distributed computing project) has some conceivable applications.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golomb_ruler#Practical_applica...

There's a misconception (that I heard dozens or hundreds of times when I was running the Cooperative Computing Awards at EFF) that discovering world record primes is useful to cryptography. In fact, it has no direct application because all of the primes used in number-theoretic algorithms like RSA and classic Diffie-Hellman are dramatically smaller than world-record sizes, and can be generated on an ordinary PC in seconds. (Try "openssl prime -generate -bits 2048" at your command line!)

(There is a wild paper from 2017 called "Post-quantum RSA" arguing that we could in principle just scale up RSA keys for post-quantum security, but that paper uses multiprime RSA moduli composed of large numbers of 4096-bit primes, instead of just the traditional two primes, so even that approach doesn't require individual primes that are especially large or hard-to-find by computer standards.)

We have apparently learned a bit about number theory and algorithms as a result of research done by the GIMPS project and its collaborators about how to optimize some of the arithmetic in the GIMPS client. I guess that's the equivalent of the claim that the space program produced various spin-off technologies while pursuing space exploration.

In general, since there are infinitely many primes, there's no reason that humanity can't keep looking for larger and larger ones indefinitely. Likewise for many other searches, both for objects which are known to be infinitely numerous and objects which may or may not have a largest example. Mostly this kind of activity has a "because it's there" flavor to it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mallory

Research mathematicians are mostly not that excited about this activity, because it isn't generating more understanding or hypotheses about mathematical structure. They're usually more excited about insights that reveal or hint at new patterns or structure, which searching for large primes doesn't really do (most of the work is mechanical, performed by computers, and the outputs aren't very surprising or suggestive in a mathematical sense).

I've hoped that publicity about discoveries like record primes might get more young people interested in mathematics (and maybe about topics like number theory and discrete math that they might not be encountering in school). I got kind of a sad view of this because people were constantly writing to me asking for monetary rewards for their inevitably-mistaken-or-confused "discoveries", but I'd like to think that there are also people out there who got curious about what we do and don't know about primes. A good place to start with that is the Prime Pages

https://t5k.org/