Why? Serious question. Surely the only people using the LLM for such specific STEM domains are the exact same people who are "chasing grants instead of researching." Certainly I can see how training an LLM on this stuff can help automate the process of grant-chasing, and maybe OpenAI can expand their homework cheating business to graduate schools. But I do not see how this stuff helps honest researchers, except a bit around the margins (e.g. perhaps Claude isn't so good at the Perl used in bioinformatics, that's a use case justifying some RLHF from a PhD).
It really seems like the main utility of this stuff is getting a higher score on Humanity's Last Exam and showing the customers/investors that actually Opus 4.9 is 2% smarter than GPT 5.5. Separately there are AlphaProof/etc-style LLMs for solving real research problems in math and CS, but those techniques don't even work for theoretical physics, let alone biology.
(I mean, OpenAI released GPT-Rosalind just yesterday, and - surprise - it's not meant for chasing grants.)
It's not 2023 anymore, it's 2026. LLMs are good enough to be useful. They have been for at least a year, and they keep getting better. You need to be living under a rock for the past few years to not notice that.
If you're saying stuff like this with a straight face then you are clearly not a scientist and you don't know what you're talking about. In 2021 there were maybe 10 papers with fictional citations. Even the publication mills at least linked to other junk papers. Now there are hundreds of thousands of papers with dishonest and useless bibliographies. This is because LLMs are an unbeatable force multiplier for dishonest and useless scientific work.
I am sure some legitimate academics are getting real use out of them. I am also sure that the net effect of LLMs on science is enormously negative, and it will take decades to fix the mess.
Hallucinated citations == strong evidence of scientific fraud. Name and shame and don't publish.
Alas, what's happening only shows the emperor has no clothes. If anyone slept through the replication crisis, they surely can't ignore it now. Can't really blame LLMs for lighting up the structural corruption of scientific process for everyone to see.
If anything, it's doing us a favor - if the journal gatekeeping and peer review can't handle people putting literal, obvious bullshit in their papers today, think what else they aren't handling either, and for how long this has been the case.