I think you misundertand me, I'm making some pie in the sky statement about AI being able to discover the laws of nature in an afternoon. I'm just making the observation that if you know the basic equiations, and enough math (which is about multivariate calc), you can derive every single formula in your Physics textbook (and most undergrads do as part of their education).

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.