> I assume progress there is kept under wraps until they can capture the economic benefits. If they can do that, then the insane valuations may actually be valid.

Or progress is not as straight forward in those fields as in math.

that's my experience (at least for experimental quantum materials research). LLMs help a lot with paper discovery, grant/paper writing etc., but on the experimental side, they barely move the needle for now. Some analyses are done faster now than they were before because you don't need to fiddle around with the code, but that's it.

In a field where a single person can maybe produce and characterize a single sample per day, AI will only really start speeding up progress once you combine it with robotics.