Someone really needs to do experiments on this, it’s possible now. David Rein and I are actively thinking about it
Arguably, there have already been some, see e.g. Can LLMs Generate Novel Research Ideas? A Large-Scale Human Study with 100+ NLP Researchers, The Ideation-Execution Gap: Execution Outcomes of LLM-Generated versus Human Research Ideas and Predicting Empirical AI Research Outcomes with Language Models. I’d interpret the results as: even models from about one year ago, with reasonable scaffolding/fine-tuning, seem already roughly in the range of a PhD student from a top institution on research taste, if not higher, in the ML research domain.
Arguably, there have already been some, see e.g. Can LLMs Generate Novel Research Ideas? A Large-Scale Human Study with 100+ NLP Researchers, The Ideation-Execution Gap: Execution Outcomes of LLM-Generated versus Human Research Ideas and Predicting Empirical AI Research Outcomes with Language Models. I’d interpret the results as: even models from about one year ago, with reasonable scaffolding/fine-tuning, seem already roughly in the range of a PhD student from a top institution on research taste, if not higher, in the ML research domain.