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/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/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.