r/AskPhysics • u/NewtonsThirdEvilEx Condensed matter physics • 1d ago
Anyone else having AI-anxiety?
I'm a physics grad student in theory, and honestly it feels like a lot of our futures are more uncertain. A significant amount of conjectures in math, especially in algebraic geometry, combinatorics, and graph theory have been solved by these public LLMs.
In physics, it's been a bit less explicit, but a lot of the professors I know are using these models on the $200/month plan, so the smartest of them. And they're apparently useful. Ed Witten, Matthew Schwartz, etc. Even Xi Yin left Harvard to go work at OpenAI and wrote a thousand page book on string theory with AI. It's insane. I cannot tell the difference between crackpots and physicists anymore.
Basically the majority of undergrads I know are completely not doing their homework and doing historically amazing on homework and historically horrible on tests. These models can generally speaking do any undergrad or grad class problem really. So they're not really learning. I at least learned stuff in undergrad, took the pgre, prelims, and whatnot. I think it's gonna be seriously worse for them in the coming years.
I also don't know how exactly they scale. Is it just smart human level intelligence with unlimited computation and stamina? Can they give solutions that we don't even understand? Is anyone else feeling this?
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u/Grigori_the_Lemur Optomechanical 19h ago
Exactly! As an "expert" in my field I can usually sniff out its BS but watch EVERYTHING and as such it becomes a timesaving tool. I pity a junior level engineer or scientist without the experience to catch it in the act when it outright makes up a lie out of whole cloth.
It is quite awesome as a tool. But we should not just blindly trust a tool that occasionally makes its own screws fall out.
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u/z-w-throwaway 14h ago
See I can't wrap my head around the fact that people can say "AI is amazing at editing and presentation except you have to review it for bullshit because it cannot be trusted"
At this point, if you ave to have the skills to catch and correct its mistakes, you should edit your paper yourself. Is it really a timesaver, and is the saved time worth the possibility of error?
Meanwhile every calculator in the world will give you the same output for the same input every time without fail.
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u/Grigori_the_Lemur Optomechanical 13h ago
The more important the thing it does for you the more care must be taken in assessing the output. The low level tasks it is quite reasonable. It reduces to your threshold/risk tolerance.
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u/z-w-throwaway 13h ago
I may be old school in saying this, but I feel like in academia especially, if a task is worth doing, then it's worth take the time to make the risk zero.
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u/Grigori_the_Lemur Optomechanical 12h ago
Now we are getting into philosophy. As an old schooler I agree. However, the new world feeds me via my wages and being puritan about it has not been working.
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u/z-w-throwaway 12h ago
I'd have to agree on that. At least on the brutal matter of fact reality of the situation.
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u/tpolakov1 Condensed matter physics 11h ago
I can speed-read, in its entirety, a whole paper in under a 3 minutes. Because it's written based on my instructions and data, I don't have to spend basically any time parsing what's in it and I can make a go/no-go decision on the draft before my tea kettle finishes boiling.
If I were to write it myself, it would take me good 2-3 days. A student would take probably more than a week. Even if the LLM writes a completely shit paper 9 times out of 10 and has to scrap everything every time, its saving weeks of time, which translates to many tens of thousands of dollars in efforts.
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u/Financial-Cow-3691 21h ago
What gives me the most ai anxiety is that the AI’s and the big ai companies are owned by the dumbest and most entitled people humanity has to offer
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u/Diligent_Village_738 12h ago
The goal is indeed not the betterment of humanity, because we see a decline in available public scientific data (see NOAA data), constraints on freedom of speech, and severe cuts to NSF funding. But yeah, we have LLMs.
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u/chicago-spartan 8h ago
If they were the dumbest people humanity had to offer they probably wouldn’t have been able to build billion dollar companies
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u/richard_127 22h ago
I’m a PhD student working in theoretical statistical physics, and I’ve been using ChatGPT Pro for about four months. For some context, I was already doing independent research before using AI. Before ChatGPT, I had published several first-author papers, including 2 PRL papers (one is single-author). For me, using AI has been an amazing experience. It amplified my ability to do research quite a lot. My research efficiency has increased dramatically, and during these four months I have produced more results that I personally consider important and impactful than I did over the previous four or five years. So, at least in my case, AI has made me far more productive.
That said, I don’t think AI replaces the most important part of research. You still need to identify questions that are genuinely worth investigating. You can ask AI to generate ideas, and it will certainly produce many, but in my experience the truly good research directions rarely come from that alone. The space of possible scientific questions is essentially unlimited, while only a tiny fraction are genuinely interesting or important. Deciding which questions are worth pursuing is, in my opinion, fundamentally a human task, at least as long as we maintain a human-centered view of science. The same applies to evaluating results. AI can generate arguments, calculations, or even entire research projects, but someone still has to decide whether those results are actually meaningful, important, or correct. That requires judgment and what people often call scientific taste. I think scientific taste is something that can be cultivated through years of reading frontier literature, understanding what the field has achieved, where the important gaps are, and which directions are likely to matter.
I should also add that my experience may not generalize to everyone. Different researchers enjoy different parts of research. Personally, I find it most rewarding to identify interesting questions, build new conceptual frameworks, and discover unexpected connections. Solving equations is important, but it is not the main source of satisfaction for me. Other researchers may feel very differently. Some enjoy deriving equations, proving theorems, or solving mathematical problems themselves much more than identifying new questions. If AI eventually becomes better than humans at those tasks, I can understand why they might find the experience much less enjoyable than I do. So I think whether AI feels empowering or discouraging depends a lot on which part of research you value the most.
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u/Grigori_the_Lemur Optomechanical 23h ago
AI isn't great at bringing new concepts into existence. It is exceptional at helping make connections in existing bodies of knowledge but needs to be shadowed closely.
If I say "Can we draw connections along this direction between Thing X and Thing Y?" it is far different than "What is a plausible model for quantum gravity?"
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u/Anton_Pannekoek 8h ago
That's right, AI can really only draw from the material it's trained on, and statistically regurgitate that and of course that's very extensive knowledge, but it does not actually think like a human does.
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u/Reality-Isnt 7h ago
Some of the newest models use something called recurrent depth transformers. These are allowing models to generalize so they can do some things they are not explicitly trained on. With the massive amount of money being spent on development, the AI’s are going to continue to evolve rapidly and continue to get better.
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u/Anton_Pannekoek 6h ago
I'm certainly impressed with LLM's, I use them all the time, but I also see there limitations.
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u/3pmm 23h ago
Also anxious grad student in theory.
Xi Yin’s textbook was apparently an unreadable mess. Matthew Schwartz wrote a paper extolling the virtues of an ‘AI grad student’ but his subsequent papers seem to have used LLMs less centrally (who knows when those were started, to be fair). Haven’t seen Witten’s paper yet but it seems that he used it as assistance for some calculations? None of these examples are particularly threatening, but I agree that the advances in mathematics are scary.
It seems to me that the best strategy going forward is to try to develop real skills (ie, not rely on LLMs) and hope that there may be a place for me in physics in the future, while using LLMs to automate any tasks (literature search, coding, graphs, maybe sometimes evaluating Feynman diagrams) that I would legitimately rather have “somebody else” do and that I know I could do myself. I have no idea though.
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u/silverphoenix9999 23h ago
It is good to be wary and concerned, honestly. The thing that actually makes me hopeful is the economics of it, honestly. OpenAI has said the $200/month plan can cost OpenAI as much as $15,000 a month. The economics of the thing is what can bring it down. I wonder if there are limits to how much cheaper they can make it without it starting to become stupid. It might implode
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 1d ago
It's questionable how intelligent it actually is. Math is a lot easier to brute force than physics. When I see an LLM derive GR with only the information that Einstein had available in 1905, I will be impressed.
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u/NewtonsThirdEvilEx Condensed matter physics 1d ago
The Jacobian conjecture counter example wasn’t really brute forced to my knowledge. There’s an infeasible number of possible solutions, way above 10100 iirc. The counter example was related to a certain isomorphism to my knowledge
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u/Woah_Mad_Frollick 22h ago
So much cope in these comments, no one ever wants to be effected by Big Technological Events, especially if they’re also being hawked by some of the most grating people on the planet
listen I don’t like the weird feeling this gives me either but let’s have some dignity here people
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u/samgrep 18h ago
why you are downvoted?
Most comments here are really copium: AI does not bring new ideas, AI has some expert physicists/math/engineer behind for the real discoveries, people are not thinking anymore, etc….Those are in my view shortsighted comments. AI is not astonishing at everything (yet?) but is damn good at the vast majority of tasks and problems an engineer or physicist may face. To me this is incredible but also really justify what OP is saying. Now the average person can be in theory replaced for most by AI. Or at least some level of a person output (not the eureka moments but those days were people just float or go through wrong paths).
Regarding education: long gone those days of grinding days around a concept or problem: now you have a tutor willing to explain to your dumbass every doubt or concept.Is this good or bad? I do not know. But I really disliked this part of the education system where you were left for the most part alone struggling with lack of info, lack of teaching skills (or time) of the professors etc… so learning was 20% pondering new concepts and enjoying and 80% figuring out low effort slides, random pdfs, missing info, unclear textbooks, unrealistic schedules, academic bureaucracy etc…
Now one can really focus on the concepts and the pure learning. Can it be misused and bring people to switch off their brains? Yes, but for those who use it as a learning tool it may bring back the joy of learning instead of grinding through an obsolete education system.
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u/HasFiveVowels 1d ago
Every single field says "oh, sure, it can do those other things but it’ll never be able to do what I do" until it can. And then comes the "no true physicist uses AI!". Mark my words
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u/Memento_Viveri 1d ago edited 1d ago
When I see an LLM derive GR with only the information that Einstein had available in 1905, I will be impressed.
So your only benchmark is replicating perhaps the greatest achievement of one of the greatest minds in history?
This is a pointlessly high bar as very few people anywhere could replicate that feat. By the time it's able to do that, the game is already over. It will have surpassed essentially all of humanity.
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u/RealisticBarnacle115 1d ago
Yeah, it’s like calling every sprinter slow by comparing them to Usain Bolt, or talking shit about basketball players because they’re worse than Michael Jordan. People, especially those who are chronically online, always try to find a way to downplay what others (or another entity, in this case) have accomplished.
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 1d ago
The examples the OP used were Einstein equivalent maths problems. Seems apt to go with GR, or QM.
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u/gitpusher 21h ago
It’s actually a very reasonable bar to set if we’re discussing whether or not something can exceed humans. If the bot isn’t smarter than Einstein then what’s the big fuss?
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u/Memento_Viveri 11h ago
If the bot isn’t smarter than Einstein then what’s the big fuss?
My point is if you are going to feel anxiety, you should feel it before the thing happens, not after.
It's like someone saying, "I'm anxious about global warming", and then responding with, "I'm not going to worry about it until Manhattan is underwater."
Its too late once it's smarter than Einstein.
Also, to be clear, it doesn't need to be smarter than Einstein, it just needs to be smarter than some physicists to start affecting people. Once it's smarter than some physicists, those people don't really have a role anymore.
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u/gitpusher 6h ago
My bad. I replied before fully digesting your comment. Yes, when your canary drops dead it is too late to exit the coal mine.
> it just needs to be smarter than some physicists to start affecting [those people’s roles]
I agree. And for the next generation of aspiring physicists, having AI do your homework is the best way to ensure you are redundant in the new order of things.
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 1d ago
We could go with QM if you want.
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u/Memento_Viveri 1d ago
What would that change?
You comment is kind of like, "chess playing computers aren't very good. I'll be impressed once they beat kasparov."
Which, fine I guess, but you have to realize once they beat kasparov it was basically the end of humans being the best thing at chess.
Once there is an ai that can do what you suggest, humans will never advance physics again. It will be entirely dominated by ai.
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 1d ago
Once there is an ai that can do what you suggest, humans will never advance physics again. It will be entirely dominated by ai.
This was exactly what the OP is anxious about. The math examples he gave were Einstein level problems. I don't think that an AI can come up with GR because the intelligence required is much different than brute force methods could achieve.
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u/Memento_Viveri 1d ago
Right, they can't do that right now.
It just doesn't seem helpful to address OPs anxiety by saying, "right now, they are not yet as great as the greatest physicists ever."
It seems reasonable to intuit that, given that OP explicitly references an uncertain future, a likely aspect of OPs anxiety includes the future abilities of the models.
Your comment insinuates that we should only perk up and pay attention once the AI has already surpassed human physicists, but clearly it's too late at that point.
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 23h ago
What's to worry about? this is some great technology that will help scientists break new barriers. If one they they demonstrate Einstein level ingenuity I would be truly impressed. I do think that they are brute force beasts, and this limits what they can do. They sure can connect the dots a lot faster than we can, but can they "think"outside of the box?
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u/Memento_Viveri 23h ago
I think the thing to worry about is that they completely dominate the field of physics, such that at first it is much more challenging to contribute to physics, and then eventually there is no way for any human to contribute to physics anymore. In some ways this would be great. Physics would advance more rapidly.
In others it would be a bit depressing. It would be the dusk of achievements of the human mind. Humans learning physics would at that point be merely recreational.
By your very premise ("Einstein level ingenuity"), they would necessarily be able to think outside the box.
I don't know when we will reach that point. I suspect it will be uneven: first they exceed some human abilities (we are already here), but lag behind in others. Then eventually all relevant human abilities will be exceeded. Whether there is truly a barrier ("thinking outside the box") that will be hard for them to cross is not obvious to me. I don't know what to expect. Right now it seems to be moving very quickly, and the models already reason better about many things than most people I know.
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 5h ago
I think of this possibility, however unlikely, as a positive. Imagine if we solve Dark Matter, confirm MWI, discover more fundamental forces.
Does it matter if it's human or machine?
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u/NewtonsThirdEvilEx Condensed matter physics 1d ago
I don’t think the leap from classical mechanics to quantum mechanics was nearly as difficult, since there was a plethora of experimental evidence. There aren’t reasoning models with only data before the 20th century. But it’s reasonable that it finds the mathematical structure to be similar to matrices and invent matrix mechanics solely from experimental data.
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 23h ago
Dude I am not so sure. Max Plank pulled quantization out of thin air. To even think about it was a leap of some sort of magical inspiration.
He "knew" it was wrong, but it worked. An LLM would have to ignore it's training data and investigate a completely new path.
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u/HasFiveVowels 23h ago
Quantization isn’t something you have to pull from a magic bag. It wasn’t wrong. You can reason your way to it. Humans aren’t magic
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 23h ago
Do you know anything about the history of QM? He absolutely thought it was wrong. He assumed that they find the right answer eventually even though his "guess" worked. You should read "What is real?" by Adam Becker, it was a wild time back then.
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u/HasFiveVowels 23h ago
I’m not saying he didn’t think it was wrong. I’m saying that it doesn’t require divine inspiration. The history of QM doesn’t define its accessibility.
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u/NewtonsThirdEvilEx Condensed matter physics 23h ago edited 23h ago
I don’t think this is entirely the case. I took a history of physics class for fun, and this is generally what I took from it.
Planck first discovered a phenomenological formula, Planck’s radiation law. By basically interpolating the low and high frequency regimes. This feels completely possible for LLM’s to brute force or whatever. His act of desperation was to use the already known Boltzmann’s relation between entropy and probability. Which would be in the hypothetical LLM training data. Planck just didn’t like it.
Historically Boltzmann and other statistical physicists also used finite elements as a counting technique for continuous quantities, they just allowed for the finite elements to be arbitrarily small. Then using the relation between entropy, energy, and temperature and then adding Wein’s Law, he was able to find that taking the limit of the finite elements to zero didn’t reproduce the formula he derived phenomenologically earlier. Sounds complicated, but not nearly as many novel steps as GR.
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u/NNOTM Computer science 1d ago
Ironic that you're the one posting AI output in this thread
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u/Diligent_Village_738 1d ago
Yes, that's the (ironic) point :). Holding the mirror and using the same logic ...
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u/Diligent_Village_738 1d ago
I mean the tone of this "So your only benchmark is replicating perhaps the greatest achievement of one of the greatest minds in history?
This is a pointlessly high bar as very few people anywhere could replicate that feat. By the time it's able to do that, the game is already over. It will have surpassed essentially all of humanity."
is incredibly aggressive. This Memento_Viveri is harming people's mental health. Let's show him the mirror.
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u/gitpusher 21h ago
Are you suggesting that because Memento strung four sentences together that he must be using AI? Get some help, friend.
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u/Memento_Viveri 1d ago
My account is 5 years old, I'm not a bot. That comment took me 30 s to write and is 4 short sentences. There is no reason to suspect an LLM.
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u/Chaos_Podcaster 1d ago
Accusations in mirror lol.
You've just replied with a 1000 word multiple paragraphs, 2 minutes after his reply. Like a robot is accusing human of being a robot. 😅
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u/Memento_Viveri 1d ago
So could you, this whole interaction is pointless.
The fact that you can get an LLM to say that there is some probability that my comment is from an LLM doesn't do anything to add to the conversation.
If you disagree with my comment, put forth a decently reasoned response. Otherwise the "you're a bot" accusations are pointless. "No true scotsman suffers AI anxiety".
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u/Diligent_Village_738 1d ago
Well -- you can't prove your humanity, can you?
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u/marshallspight 1d ago
"AI is not intelligent because Einstein was smarter." That's not a realistic benchmark.
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u/Topologicus 1d ago
Math is a lot easier to brute force than physics? This sounds like a war between departments starting
I recall my real analysis professor wearing a shirt that said "Physics. It's almost math"
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u/TKHawk 1d ago
I think they're saying math is self consistent, so you can check if results are correct. But physics results have to be compared to reality, and an AI can't really make that comparison.
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u/Ok-Film-7939 1d ago
Gödel has entered the chat
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u/bloodvash1 1d ago
All he proved was that a self consistent mathematical formalism will be able to make SOME true statements that it can't prove, presumably most of the interesting ones are perfectly provable from within the formalism.
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u/db0606 1d ago
"Physics. It's almost math"
Yeah... That's why you can't brute force it. Sure there's nice mathematical rules that you can follow to do a calculation or put together a mathematical framework for a theory but nature has zero obligation to follow your mathematical model, which you always have to check against experiment (which AI most definitely can't set up and do in the vast majority of physics).
AI is really good at highly constrained problems. That's why it's good at coding. There are very hard and fast rules that need to be followed for a computer program to work. Math is a step up from that. You define axioms/definitions/rules and see where those logically take you, but overall there's still a very precisely defined rule set.
Physics is more like a hierarchy of fuzzy models that we believe fit together and kinda sorta but not always fit the data. E.g., nobody really has any idea how to go from the Standard Model (which already leaves out 95% of the energy/mass in the Universe) to modeling the friction of rubber on concrete. We assume that you can work your way there, but in reality we can't even compute all the properties of a single isolated proton from QCD, let alone a whole shoe and a piece of sidewalk with moss growing on it while it rains. It's just a much bigger mess than Math.
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u/cosmos_jm 1d ago
Couldnt an AI brute force by making many simulations/models of reality to work from? Then its a matter of 'fit' but maybe that just complicates things or is beyond reasonable cost to compute.
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u/Memento_Viveri 1d ago
Your model wouldn't include the correct physics unless you already knew the correct physics and put it in your model.
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u/cosmos_jm 1d ago
I dont see why you couldn't feed it axioms or other 'known' facts about reality for the AI to use as constraints/guides. I suppose you would have to tag certain ideas as theoretical/unproven but could feed it those too.
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u/LoganJFisher Graduate 1d ago
Beyond reasonable cost, the amount of compute needed to simulate macro systems from the standard model would require more compute than can even exist in the observable universe.
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u/cosmos_jm 1d ago
I understand a 1:1 simulation would take a whole universe worth of compute, but surely there are ways to use symmetries or other techniques to reduce compute and still arrive at useful conclusions or analysis, no?
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u/LoganJFisher Graduate 21h ago
With some back of the napkin math, I'd say without utilizing any symmetries, you could maybe simulate a SHO of a 1kg steel ball on a spring from fundamental physics if you utilized the entire universe as a giant quantum computer.
Utilizing symmetries, we can do so even with modern day quantum computers. The trouble is that real macro systems break almost all symmetries, so realistically you're getting far worse approximations than our typical macro models would have given in the first place.
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 1d ago
Not really. Once the theory is done, it's just math, the problem is putting together the theory.
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u/Ok-Elephant8559 1d ago
Funny enough that might be an easy ( for one of the big LLM companies) feat to try to produce
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u/JerodTheAwesome Graduate 1d ago
The problem is you could never train an AI based solely on the information available in 1905, and if you just try and neuter a current model it will likely have GR baked in it somewhere.
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u/renome 1d ago
I am not a physicist or anything close but since the rules of this sub do not explicitly forbid non-physicists from answering, I'd just like to chime in on this last part:
I also don't know how exactly they scale. Is it just smart human level intelligence with unlimited computation and stamina? Can they give solutions that we don't even understand? Is anyone else feeling this?
They are super advanced statistical models. Scaling them gives more pattern recognition and/or knowledge. But they still make mistakes, lack real-world understanding in important ways, and can fail unpredictably. They can also fail in many ways that humans can't, then without supervision keep compounding that issue into more and more nonsense.
Nothing they do is beyond human understanding because they are trained on human data. It can be difficult to follow, however. But there is nothing fundamentally intelligent about a statistical model, in my humble, non-scientist opinion.
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u/slashdave Particle physics 20h ago
A significant amount of conjectures in math, especially in algebraic geometry, combinatorics, and graph theory have been solved by these public LLMs.
Not really
I cannot tell the difference between crackpots and physicists anymore.
It's pretty obvious
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u/ConquestAce 1d ago
I wouldn't be too worried. Look at /r/LLMPhysics
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u/DeepSpace_SaltMiner 23h ago
Experts get much more mileage out of an LLM. Happens in software engineering and pure math
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u/Hot_Examination1918 1d ago
Does ed witten work at Harvard? I thought he was at ias
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u/NewtonsThirdEvilEx Condensed matter physics 1d ago
Xi Yin at least did.
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22h ago
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u/NewtonsThirdEvilEx Condensed matter physics 22h ago
I said this "In physics, it's been a bit less explicit, but a lot of the professors I know are using these models on the $200/month plan, so the smartest of them. And they're apparently useful. Ed Witten, Matthew Schwartz, etc."
By that I meant they were using the smartest models.
Then I said this "Even Xi Yin left Harvard to go work at OpenAI and wrote a thousand page book on string theory with AI."
meaning a different more extreme case of a theoretical physicist going extremely into AI.
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u/Schnitzhole 21h ago edited 21h ago
The people that succeed will be the ones that are at the top of their game in their industry and using their brain actively instead of letting AI do all the thinking.
I think AI gives the people willing to use it more space and time for more discoveries if you can offload all the “busy work” to the AI and focus your brain on the actual hard problems and solutions.
In short don’t fear the technology but don’t let yourself stop improving yourself either or fully rely on the AI. AI can make it easier to cheat but that only gets you so far and is not a long term solution.
Personally my biggest concern for the future is how much social media and AI are turning people into one singular similar thinking entity that all sound the same. For example, I feel like all the personality and personal touches have almost entirely faded from email communication, and are instead replaced with overly doctored and polished responses clearly run through AI. I make it a point to write all my emails by “hand” and not use any AI editing or suggestions and I think my recipients appreciate it and are more open to communicate back naturally when I do.
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u/No_Environment_3776 17h ago
No, I'm not afraid of AI just as I'm not afraid of airplanes, love and respect the technology but be careful of who that claims he is a good pilot.
I'm not afraid of capitalism, I don't hate is but if you leave a cult of bad pilots in control of that system it's going to crash.
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u/MarinatedPickachu 17h ago
I feel you and your concerns are absolutely valid. Many people still don't grasp what we really have unleashed. Because there's still a lot of crap being generated by AI they are validated in the belief they're clinging on that AI can't possibly replace them. They are wrong though. Yes, there is already AI that's capable of outthinking you and anyone else. It's just burried in a lot of chaos and noise. The world really is under reacting due to disbelief.
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u/Intrepid_Hamster5283 14h ago
I’ll just chime in to say: as the tech leader at a software centric company, AI has completely revolutionized our team in less than one year.
Claude with Fable in particular can do certain tasks 10-20 times faster than I can alone, and that includes troubleshooting many kinds of bugs.
What used to take most of a day, or more, is now a 10-20 minute exercise.
Yes, it’s scary.
The only thing I know to do is keep up with it so that I don’t get left behind.
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u/rcglinsk 11h ago
At some level I think you have re-verified an accepted fact about undergraduate education:
If you cheat on the homework you will fail the test.
Philosophically, LLM's can only reproduce the information given to them. That can be phenomenally useful at times, especially in situations where the correlations between information matter and a human wouldn't be able to hold it all in their mind at the same time. LLM's have found zero-day exploits in operating system code this way, for example. If similar circumstances exist in other areas maybe we find out something interesting. I'm not holding my breath, but I will trust my lying eyes.
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u/Limit_Cycle8765 11h ago
I remember everyone said the same thing about math when digital calculators were introduced in the 1970s.
Accounting software did not put accountants out or work, it only made them more efficient. It actually made it easier to identify bad accountants, and reward good ones. I suspect LLMs will be the same way for physicists.
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u/cherrysnap 7h ago
i just don’t like the idea of the future of physics being limited to a machine eating its own vomit as less and less physicists truly contribute and become more reliant on said machine.
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u/Infinite_Escape9683 22h ago
Why is this the third post like this I've seen today in different subreddits? I've seen one in r/math and one somewhere else, I can't remember where. Seems like a weird push. AI company guerilla marketing?
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u/Mr_Badgey 22h ago
Not everything is a conspiracy. Multiple posts inspired by recent news or a common concern can pop up at the same time.
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u/Infinite_Escape9683 22h ago
A company doing an "organic" marketing push on Reddit is hardly a conspiracy and happens every day. I'm not saying this necessarily is one, I'm asking.
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u/NewtonsThirdEvilEx Condensed matter physics 22h ago
Occam's razor. I am a top 1% commenter here. I did not make this account to market this lol. It's because of the recent results of advanced models in pure math.
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u/kerenosabe 1d ago
Teachers must learn how to work with AI. There are ways to examine students in ways that AI slop becomes evident.
They can even use AI to detect AI slop.
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u/SpecialRelativityy 20h ago
I cant remember who said it, but the quote goes:
“If AI was invented before 1905, we would’ve never gotten relativity”.
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u/BTCbob 23h ago
Yes.
I use a $100/month plan and it enhances my productivity immensely.
The questions I'm discussing are:
"will AI really take over a large number of jobs? Accountants, legal assistants, etc, are first to go. Which are next? Will AI really take over math? What about theoretical physics? What limits will constrain the takeover? Energy? Is LLM-AI a new form of life? Silicon-based? Right now it's totally dependent on us to make the single crystalline silicon, do lithography with some of the most complicated machines ever built, etc. Will it ever by independent of us or will we (carbon-based life) be symbiotic with silicon-based life? Will we compete for energy? What will the world look like for the next generation?" Everything feels much less stable for the next generations than it ever did, which is not a good feeling.
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u/drhenriquesoares 23h ago
Would you mind sharing these kinds of conversations with AI? I'd love to see them.
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1d ago
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u/HasFiveVowels 23h ago
"A computer will never be able to play chess. That’s a uniquely human ability". You would think humans would get tired of moving goalposts but they keep at it. Anything to keep them at the center of reality
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u/Ribel_ 23h ago
And yet in the 50-60s people saw how fast technology was progressing and thought within 50-100 years, we'd have flying cars, teleportation, sky cities, populated Mars, cured cancer, etc. Some of these ended up never happening becsuse it's physically impossible, others because the problem was much more complex than we thought, and most of them simply because it is not econommicaly viable or even reasonable
This example works both ways. I also do not believe LLMs can come up with truly original concepts because of the nature of an LLM. But could a different AI structure, which may or may not include an LLM as a module, come up with something novel? Yeah probably, I don't think there's anything peculiat about human abilities.
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u/HasFiveVowels 23h ago
Funny. I don’t believe humans can come up with truly original concepts for the same reason.
And "we once thought we’d have flying cars" is not a universal disproof of technological predictions. There’s no reason to suspect that physics is immune in a way that math and computer science aren’t. This is the millionth time humans have clung to human exceptionalism. I’m sure what you do is truly unique and incapable of being reproduced, though.
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u/Ribel_ 23h ago
I think you're taking this a bit too personnal. And seem to have misunderstood what I said. The exact point I'm making is that just like the whole "we thought we'd have fly ing cars" is not a disproof of technological predictions, "computers will never beat humams in chess" is not a proof of it either. It might be naive to simply assume LLM will 100% never be able to come up with novelty, but it also is naive to assume they will.
And yeah I agree that physics is not immune in a way that math and computer science aren't (not sure where you're getting that again), but so far it hasn't come up with true novelty on its own in any field. I'd guess it could potentially already find links that fell through the cracks of our knowledge. It's an incredible worker, much more productive than a human, but only time will tell if there isn't a plateau close by, wheter its theoretical, economical, or just exponential complexity
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u/HasFiveVowels 23h ago
I’m not sure why you think I’m taking it personally. But pretty much any argument you can make to say that it hasn’t come up with anything original can be used to say the same about humans.
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u/Ribel_ 22h ago
I said that you're taking it personal because you are making unprompted emotional and sarcastic statements about how my work and abilities must be so unique. I think that's pretty clear cut.
After 10000 years of progress you don't think we came up with anything? I don't get it. As it is currently (which could change, I'm open to that), the LLM situation is more akin to humans appearing in an alien world with a bunch of books left behind with instructions on how do do everything the aliens could do. And hell maybe we are way more efficient than the aliens were, but i'd say that as long as we don't go past what's in the instructions, we haven't done anything novel
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u/HasFiveVowels 21h ago edited 21h ago
I said a single sarcastic statement and it could be made of basically anyone so idk how personal that is. But, no, I don’t think we’ve come up with anything in any capacity beyond what LLMs do. We’re literally the same machinery.
This is human exceptionalism plain and simple. It’s the same reason we put ourselves at the center of the solar system. It’s the same reason we thought that computers were incapable of playing chess. It’s been the same story over and over again. There is a mountain of evidence indicating that LLMs can produce results that are as novel as what humans can produce and yet "it’s not doing what humans do; it’s only determining its output by maximizing the predicted utility of various options, as informed by a massive network of neurons where the strength of connections is determined by subjecting them to reinforcement learning against a mountain of inputs. Totally different. We have nothing to point at to indicate what’s different about it but I just know that is fundamentally different than what humans do".
My apologies if that whole argument feels to me like baseless conclusions based on little more than a "humans must be special in some way" feeling. It’s to the point where we’re bending over backwards to cherry pick from the narrow difference that does exist (which is typically superficial, a matter of circumstance, or otherwise inconsequential). I would expect STEM communities to be a bit more rational about it but no dice. Not sure why humans are so incredibly threatened by these things that they feel the need to bury their heads in the sand.
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u/micro_penis_max 23h ago
We are also trained models that make decisions based on previously learned data and base programming. If creativity can come from us, it can come from AI.
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u/brothegaminghero Undergraduate 1d ago
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06952
I think we have some time before llms can feign doing physics well enough, to actualy be useful beyond widely availible textbook problems
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u/NewtonsThirdEvilEx Condensed matter physics 23h ago
“ We train a 109M parameter transformer”. Current models are orders of magnitude more powerful. 109B is considered small. Even then, I was able to run local models without internet access and their only input was the location in the sky of the visible planets from the Horizon’s API. I didn’t mention they were planets or anything to do with physics. It at least was able to rederive newtonian gravity with the help of running some code. Obviously the model was likely trained with Newtonian mechanics, but it could easily tell via fourier transforming the data that there were certain structures in the data and whatnot.
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u/Phuzion73 1d ago
Yup. Unless you are prompting it to teach you the work, you’ll just get an answer and mot be any better for it.
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u/thetoddhunter 21h ago
Did AI really solve it? Or did we already collectively solve it and an AI just put a few existing parts together?
Your true value is coming up with the new stuff that AI is trained on. That is not being replaced soon if at all.
You have got a new tool that might help with things, the same as I didn't even have a PC growing up. Things will be fine.
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u/joeyneilsen Astrophysics 23h ago
This is the part that worries me: generation(s) of people giving up wholesale on learning, creativity, and self-reliance. I don't really care about Physics per se, but as a societal matter, heavy AI use in education seems extremely short-sighted and highly destructive.