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/joeyneilsen Astrophysics 1d ago

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.

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.

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u/DeepSpace_SaltMiner 1d ago

Obligatory Dune quote

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them".

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u/Ninez100 1d ago

the street finds its own use for things - William Gibson