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.