As a scientist, AI has made me feel the most intellectually alive and excited I have felt since I was a graduate student and postdoc more than 20 years ago. Every day I can start with an idea in the morning, and by lunchtime, I see a testable, rational, well-thought-out hypothesis forming in front of my eyes. And every day, the possibilities seem endless, like mountains beyond mountains. What a time to be alive. Here's a case in point. I'm collaborating with a professor, an experimentalist, who is trying to solve a thorny problem in his field. There's one particular molecule that he is using in his experiments that seems to result in radically different crystal structures compared to similar molecules. What's happening here? He has come up with a few different hypotheses that could explain the differences but is not a theoretician and needs to tease them apart. On Thursday, I started an investigation using AI at his bequest. The AI immediately confirmed the hypotheses that he had in mind and added a few of its own. Then it started its exploration. The investigation was carried out in three different phases, each of increasing difficulty; the first one using classical physics, and the second and third using quantum mechanical techniques of increasing rigor. This tiered strategy is the right one. By Thursday evening, I had the glimpse of an answer. Most of the hypotheses had been examined and rejected. Two stood out, although the AI identified one as more a mechanism through which the other one operated rather than a root cause. It immediately pivoted to the higher-level, more rigorous calculation. Every time I interacted with the AI, it was more like a dialogue between a professor and a bright student or scientific collaborator than a mandate issued to a tool. The feeling was very much of a process where the AI and I were solving a problem together. I steered the conversation several times, pushed back, suggested course-corrections, acknowledged my own wrong ideas as well as the AI's and went back and forth. The AI was successful in keeping multiple requests in its memory, stacking them by priority while never losing the conversation thread. By late Friday morning, there had collected enough data from the more rigorous calculation to corroborate the suspicion that it was really just one hypothesis that was the root cause. It then moved on to the next step, which was to come up with a distinct set of novel molecules that would confirm the hypothesis beyond any reasonable doubt. In addition, it launched an even more rigorous calculation at a higher level of theory. By the end of Friday, roughly 48 hours later, using this multi-layered approach of increasing rigor, backed up by references, and made useful and actionable by testable experiments, the AI had arrived at a solid, rigorous conclusion. Now imagine doing this every day, about any topic under the scientific sun, in any scientific field, so that your intellectual labor is multiplied a million-fold. Mountains beyond mountains. What a time to be alive.