> a Junior (in ANY subject) has the ability to LEARN so much faster with an AI research assistant

This is a testable hypotheses with severe lack of citations. Intuition would argue the opposite. We learn by using our brains, if we offload the thinking to a machine and copy their output we don‘t learn. A child does not learn multiplication by using a calculator, and a language learner will not learn a new language by machine translating every sentence. In both cases all they’ve learnt is using a tool to do what they skipped learning.

As a precondition I think we have to assume that the person in question 1) wants to learn and 2) is smart enough to absorb new info and apply it and 3) reflects enough to adjust their approach when hitting bottlenecks or making mistakes 4) has a drive to create. Without these, self driven learning is not viable - and that has very little to do with AI.

For such a person, I believe AI can be very empowering for learning. Like Google, wikipedia and stack overflow, Arxiv before it - AI tools give access to a lot of information. It allows to quickly dig deep into any topic you can imagine. And yes, the quality is variable - so one needs to find ways to filter and synthesize from imperfect info. But that was also the case before. Furthermore AI tools can be used to find holes in arguments or a paper. And by coding one can use it to test out things in practice. These are also powerful (albeit imperfect) learning tools. But they will not apply themselves.