AI needs humans to encode ideas in words. It needs those ideas to span the space of possibilities of, say, Navier Stokes. Then AI can be, as you say, a terrifyingly effective way to search that space.
But when the building-block ideas are still being formed, I'm not sure that AI is good at forming them.
But when the building-block ideas are still being formed, I'm not sure that AI is good at forming them.