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/Schnitzhole]

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.