Intelligence has solved all of our solved problem thus far, it's reasonable to assume that if a problem can be solved with intelligence, maybe it's a matter of doing the intellectual work to understand existence better or engineer something or in your case making efforts into making the cost-benefit tradeoff acceptable, then AI can solve all those problems. Since one of those problems is making smarter than human AI, AI can solve that one too, and thus be even better equipped to solve the others.

The problem of entropy is one I think AI might not be able to solve, but that's only using my laymen knowledge of human understandings of the universe.