A Google and MIT FutureTech study finds scientists save about 7 hours a week using AI, but nearly half now report a growing backlog of untested hypotheses. The piece, an interview with study co-lead Mihai Codreanu, looks at why faster idea generation isn't yet producing faster discoveries.

• The study drew on 15M Gemini interactions, 2,690 specialized models, and a survey of 637 US and UK researchers; about half of respondents said their bottleneck had shifted to downstream work like experimentation and data collection.
• A "verification tax": 88% of scientists spent more than 10% of their saved time checking AI outputs, and nearly half spent over a quarter of it.
• AI may nudge researchers toward safer, data-rich questions (a "streetlight effect"), even as it widens their access to ideas from other fields.