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I find this wildly implausible.
The "up to" might be doing a lot of the work here. Some (many) weeks, those people spend all their days just writing grant proposals, writing/editing research papers, peer-reviewing other papers, preparing teaching, and answering emails. On those tasks, you could have an LLM do 90% of the writing. Still going to involve lots of prompting, rejecting output and prompting again. You can also have it do 90% of your literature surveys. It is better at search than the old tools are, after all.
The question is if this "up to 90%" is actually what "drives scientific discovery". Because when a grad student shows up with interesting measurement results, the LLM will do 0% of the thinking of what that means, what the updated hypothesis is, what direction the research is going to go in, and what potential papers this might result in and what other measurements are now necessary to test the current hypotheses.
Same goes for peer-review. The LLM can write the boilerplate "this is garbage unfit for this kind of journal". The decision that the paper sounds fishy and the data looks unconvincing is not coming from the LLM.
Probably well over 90% of the effort put into research is already useless. It hasn't gone unobserved that we keep putting more and more resources into research with fewer and fewer results (compared to the early-to-mid 20th century, for example). Many excuses are offered for this such as "the low hanging fruit is taken", but perhaps they're all false and the current methods of doing research are just extremely wasteful.
It's certainly both. If your grant success rate in 2025 is 16%, you just have to write 6 times as many grant proposals. Does that additional labor lead to progress? No, on the contrary.
But on the other hand it is absolutely true that the low hanging fruit are gone. Look at the first Nobel in physics: X-rays. Even in the late 19th century, a single motivated human could just go and make a cathode tube from scratch. Glass blowing, vacuum pumps, high voltage source, some simple metal work, silver bromide coated plates. It's far from trivial, but really, you could do it entirely on your own, and fast. Stuff like that is mostly gone now. You need hundreds of thousands of dollars just for the experimental equipment - because for 100 years, legions of people have tried doing frontier work with little money, and they still do inside no-name university labs all over the world. The frontier now needs hundreds of hours of work from an army of expert technicians across a dozen specialized companies just to do the first test setup. And someone needs to pay for that.
Or do you have another explanation? The reward for cheap and effective science would be enormous. If it were possible, somebody somewhere would be doing it, right?
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