A human scientist takes decades to train, and more years to reach the frontier of their research field by diligent reading and conversation. This is the 'burden of knowledge', and it's commonly believed to be one reason ideas have been getting harder to find — by the time human scientists can get up to speed, they're often so old that their ideas are no longer novel. AI just annihilates this constraint — it can assimilate the entire literature and reach the frontier of research extremely quickly, and it can also tell human scientists where the frontier lies without forcing them to discover that for themselves.
