I will go on a limb and say that the same type of “explosion” that happened with AI art will happen with AIs doing actual research. We saw the tip of the iceberg with this on protein folding, but I think AI is going to start getting pointed at fundamental physics research (look at what Nim Arkani-Hamed is working on with structures that exist outside of space-time and imagine if an AI could make progress there).

A lot of our big breakthroughs in physics are often found by some human noticing patterns in mathematics that they can extrapolate and apply to other areas. We will very soon be able to ask AIs to just go look for patterns and report back. This is going to push us toward singularity-level advances in ways that most people are not currently expecting