I don't know, this just seems like gatekeeping of the term "research" simply because you don't like the way it's being done.

Many modern medicines do not have understood mechanisms of action, yet we know they work. Are the people who found them not conducting drug research?

Do we even have a different term for what the AI labs are conducting if it's not mathematical research?

Additionally, I would argue that any work that adds to the total corpus of known facts increases human understanding, even if the path to get to each fact isn't understood. It's hard to argue we'd be better off with less total information.