"Our work is so much harder than their work that AI now does" is a refrain of the AI story. In technical terms you concern can be stated as "AI needs to be much more sample-efficient to not be bottlenecked by the speed of doing experiments." People don't find out all the relevant phenomena present there by holy spirit, after all.

BTW, there's also a problem of asking interesting questions that AIs aren't yet good at.

No one has found any principled walls of AI development yet. And empirical results are quite telling. So, I guess, those problems will not stand for long.