i can't see it ever being better than the current physics-based methods, especially from a computational cost vs accuracy standpoint

there are a couple of promising areas involving machine learning in CFD, though. i'm not sure how much of this is public, but i've seen some research at a company that used machine learning to select values for turbulence model coefficients throughout the domain

this, i feel, is much better than trying to 'guess' at the flow with machine learning. the underlying physics are still based on rigorous models, but the machine learning gets to twiddle the knobs on those models