If you look at the history of physics I don't think it really worked like that. It took about three centuries from Newton to Maxwell because it's hard to just deduce everything from basic principles.
Since smart people can derive a lot of knowledge from a tiny set of axioms, smart AIs should be able to as well, which means you don't need to rely on a huge volume of curated information. Which means that needing to invest the internet and training on a terabyte of text might not be how these newer models are trained, and since they don't need to learn that much raw information, they might be smaller and faster.
Second, we know nothing about these models or how they work and trained, and indeed, if they can do these things or not. But a smart human could (by smart I mean someone who gets good grades at engineering school effortlessly, not Albert Einstein)