Can an AI Model Do Research better than PhDs?

If we look at the best agentic models right now, they can do most quantitative social-science research tasks better than most professors globally. Too many Ph.D.s with tenure are producing work that is not contributing to human knowledge. The value of qualitative research is going up because that’s something that AI cannot do well — ethnography and actually interviewing people in person, especially in hard-to-reach places. - Alexander Kustov, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame in the Chronicle of Higher Ed