> What about AI research itself? Is OpenAI close to automating its human staff out of a job?

It's more like they've already automated the parts of the jobs that the humans most closely thought of as the "their job"

They and Anthropic have indicated that the models are substantially augmenting the research and doing large amounts of work autonomously at this point. Here is one of the many blog posts on it [1]. Many people would dismiss this as "marketing" so take it for what you will.

My guess from following this stuff quite closely is that these companies are still a couple years away from fully autonomous research staff.

[1]. https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improveme...

Yes, but they wouldn't publish that bit lest other companies steal the ideas.