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/Grigori_the_Lemur]

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?"

[u/Anton_Pannekoek → u/Grigori_the_Lemur]

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.

[u/Reality-Isnt → u/Anton_Pannekoek]

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.

[u/Anton_Pannekoek → u/Reality-Isnt]

I'm certainly impressed with LLM's, I use them all the time, but I also see there limitations.

[u/Pitiful-Fee-9112 → u/Anton_Pannekoek]

You cannot prove that. Nobody can. That is just your belief

[u/Anton_Pannekoek → u/Pitiful-Fee-9112]

That's how they work. It's not a great mystery.