My experience doing LLM research is that the average research project is of roughly 3-4 months in duration, and even major projects are rarely >9 months (except well known examples like GPT-4, o1, etc, which are a little longer (but even those are highly decomposable)). In fact, I think AI research as currently practiced by industry labs is *unusually easier to automate* relative to fully automating software engineering.
So overall while I think you could be correct about the SWE trend, I currently think it will be possible to automate medium size research projects by 2028, that a team of 2-3 researchers in an industry lab might be assigned today for 3-6 months. And it's hard to see how the cost would not be competitive given that AI research talent is so scarce.
My experience doing LLM research is that the average research project is of roughly 3-4 months in duration, and even major projects are rarely >9 months (except well known examples like GPT-4, o1, etc, which are a little longer (but even those are highly decomposable)). In fact, I think AI research as currently practiced by industry labs is *unusually easier to automate* relative to fully automating software engineering.
So overall while I think you could be correct about the SWE trend, I currently think it will be possible to automate medium size research projects by 2028, that a team of 2-3 researchers in an industry lab might be assigned today for 3-6 months. And it's hard to see how the cost would not be competitive given that AI research talent is so scarce.