I wouldn't be so dismissive of the objection. That loop involves way more flexible goal oriented attention, more intrinsic/implicit understanding of plausible

I wouldn't be so dismissive of the objection. That loop involves way more flexible goal oriented attention, more intrinsic/implicit understanding of plausible cause and effect based on context, and more novel idea creation than it seems. You can only brute force things with combinatorics and probabilities that have been well mapped via human attention, as piggy-backing off of lots of human digested data is just a clever way of avoiding those issues. Research is by definition novel human attention directed at a given area, so it can't benefit from that strategy in the same way domains which have already had a lot of human attention can.