Note that AI doesn’t need to come up with original research ideas or do much original thinking to speed up research by a bunch. Even if it speeds up the menial labor of writing code, running experiments, and doing basic data analysis at scale, if you free up 80% of your researchers’ time, your researchers can now spend all of their time doing the important task, which means overall cognitive labor is 5x faster. This is ignoring effects from using your excess schlep-labor to trade against non-schlep labor leading to even greater gains in efficiency.
Note that AI doesn’t need to come up with original research ideas or do much original thinking to speed up research by a bunch. Even if it speeds up the menial labor of writing code, running experiments, and doing basic data analysis at scale, if you free up 80% of your researchers’ time, your researchers can now spend all of their time doing the important task, which means overall cognitive labor is 5x faster. This is ignoring effects from using your excess schlep-labor to trade against non-schlep labor leading to even greater gains in efficiency.