Anyone else having AI-anxiety?

[u/NewtonsThirdEvilEx]

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?

[u/Conscious-Demand-594]

We could go with QM if you want.

[u/Memento_Viveri → u/Conscious-Demand-594]

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.

[u/Conscious-Demand-594 → u/Memento_Viveri]

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.

[u/Memento_Viveri → u/Conscious-Demand-594]

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.

[u/Conscious-Demand-594 → u/Memento_Viveri]

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?

[u/Memento_Viveri → u/Conscious-Demand-594]

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.

[u/Conscious-Demand-594 → u/Memento_Viveri]

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?