With a tool like this, you could imagine an end-to-end service for restoring and modernizing old scientific books and papers: digitization, cleanup, LaTeX reformatting, collaborative or volunteer-driven workflows, OCR (like Mathpix), and side-by-side comparison with the original. That would be useful.
Tao’s doing a lot of related work in mathematics, so I can say that first of all literature search is a clearly valuable function frontier models offer.
Past that, A frontier LLM can do a lot of critiquing, a good amount of experiment design, a check on statistical significance/power claims, kibitz on methodology..likely suggest experiments to verify or disprove. These all seem pretty useful functions to provide to a group of scientists to me.
Don’t forget replication!