This was shower thinking and might not have academic ramifications.
We don't know how to define amazing progress in terms of what we know, so it's hard for us to imagine training an AI to invent things. People regularly say that AIs can not come up with new ideas, with a counterargument that humans can barely come up with new things that aren't just rearrangings of old things as well.
If you could logically place an AI at a point in history where we know a critical invention appeared and give it the info it needs to reproduce it (and no info about itself), knowing that we can define in those "world states" what "amazing progress" looked like, we could know when it successfully developed metallurgy, or plumbing and irrigation, or discovered the quaternion formula, or any other number of amazing advances in human research and development.
THAT is when you let it fly in the real world exposed to all of our math and science, because it has clearer goals.
Now, there's a caveat here, which is that it might only infer how to make "subpar" advances, because who knows what the opportunity cost was for humanity of developing metallurgy instead of super metallurgy. But I think having it analyze the progress "solution space" would lead us to a lot more than that eventually.
I could write a white paper on this instead of glossing over it but I think anybody who's anybody could take this high level concept and write a whitepaper on it anyhow.
Hire me silicon valley
Cheers
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