I think you’re somewhat downplaying the major impacts even just human level (say, as good as a talented PhD student) AGI could have. The key difference is just by how much the ceiling on specialised intellectual labour would be lifted. Anything theoretical or computational could have almost infinite labour thrown at it, you could try more and risk more. And I’d be really surprised if you couldn’t for example achieve decent DFT, or at least a good fast XC functional, using a diffusion model or such, given enough attempts. AGI coupled with robotic chemical synthesis labs (which are already a thing) could try a lot of things in parallel. And if the time horizon for the research was really 60 years, a “simple” speedup of 6X makes that a decade. That’s not a lot, and that’s just this avenue of research, and assuming no ASI.
I think you’re somewhat downplaying the major impacts even just human level (say, as good as a talented PhD student) AGI could have. The key difference is just by how much the ceiling on specialised intellectual labour would be lifted. Anything theoretical or computational could have almost infinite labour thrown at it, you could try more and risk more. And I’d be really surprised if you couldn’t for example achieve decent DFT, or at least a good fast XC functional, using a diffusion model or such, given enough attempts. AGI coupled with robotic chemical synthesis labs (which are already a thing) could try a lot of things in parallel. And if the time horizon for the research was really 60 years, a “simple” speedup of 6X makes that a decade. That’s not a lot, and that’s just this avenue of research, and assuming no ASI.