Fuck AI

Exactly. It's best for problems that both:

1. Have a vast possible space of potential solutions.
2. Can be quickly checked for accuracy.
3. Has more than one right answer.

You want to come up with a new chemical to do a thing? Have an AI run through billions of permutations to find the one compound that can do that thing best. Then test that compound. See if it's more effective than current solutions. Maybe it missed a better compound somewhere in the universe of potential compounds. But if what it found is still better than the current solution, that's still progress and has real value to the world.

For an example, think of an AI built to search for high temperature superconductors. There's an endless variety of possible compounds that might lead to this. But the time to test any individual compound isn't that large. At a basic level you just need to synthesize it, confirm it's a superconductor, and measure its critical temperature. Simple stuff (apart from maybe the synthesis.) Testing one compound for superconductivity isn't hard. Trying to screen through trillions of candidate high temperature superconductors is. So you let the AI churn through the vast universe of possible options. Have it spit out the top ten candidates. Then you go to the lab, synthesize them, and try them out. If it hallucinates and is wrong? Very little cost beyond some lab time. If it misses one? Oh well, maybe we'll find it later. Say the current record for a superconductor is 151K. The AI predicts a compound with a transition temperature of 155K. Maybe it misses one that could do it at 157K. But oh well, a better high temperature superconductor is still a better high temperature superconductor!

This is where AI shines. When incremental progress is acceptable and when the solution is easily verifiable.