Scott Aaronson comments on his blog "Given this news, I’ll up my personal probability of P=NP from 3% to 5%." (https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=10239#comment-2042428)

This proves that EXP != NP, which was a stronger claim than P != NP.

In a way it shows that NP is perhaps less distant from P than imagined. Whether it can be _reduced_ to P in some gigabrain way, or whether that can be shown to be impossible remains to be seen.

It is definitely progress towards an answer to P ?= NP.

There's a chain of classes P, NP(aka Sigma_1), Sigma_2, .., Sigma_n, ... PSPACE, EXPTIME. What we know for sure is that P < EXPTIME, others are unknown (well, maybe this paper adds something to this, time will tell).

It's conceivable that each of them is smaller than the next, but also that e.g. P < NP = all the sigmas < PSPACE < EXPTIME or many other possibilities. I think the general consensus is that it's more likely that there are more inequalities than not, but the fact is that we can't even show that P is less than PSPACE so far, which would be extraordinarily surprising if it were true.

It basically just says that NP is not the same as EXP