And that's exactly the kind of stuff Google is trying to accelerate. One tangential but highly relevant example is their work on predicting molecular properties [0]. They were basically able to use neural networks to speed up the simulator by 300,000x, taking something that would take hours to less than a second. As you mention, this entirely changes the way you work and iterate. Here's a video of Jeff Dean talking more about it [1].
[0] https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/predicting-properties-of-m...