I wonder though how much of science has similar issues, that there are hundreds of semi-promising but niche areas that require tons ton of deep analysis that would have simply cost too much to explore all areas, but now become feasible.
We weren't willing to pay for 200 math PhD students to try to find singularities in Navier-Stokes, I am skeptical of how much we would be willing to pay OpenAI to do research on "niche scientific areas"?