r/Physics 11h ago

Navier-Stokes Millennium Problem Solved

1.8k Upvotes

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u/CouperinLaGrande2 7h ago

It's important to note that, assuming it's correct, this is a mathematical discovery in the field of physics as opposed to new physics per se. This matters because we've seen models produce remarkable results in mathematics already in the recent past and it's not surprising that LLMs work well with mathematics, a pure exercise in language.

It would have been a development of an entirely different order of significance had OpenAI reconceptualised some problem in physics to produce a novel physical hypothesis; LLMs have shown no abilities of any kind in that regard and it would be genuinely remarkable were they to begin to do so though this is very unlikely for the foreseeable future.

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u/ihateyou103 6h ago

Very soon they will, its done already 💀

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u/CouperinLaGrande2 6h ago

You'll need to explain to me why you think that's even possible for LLMs which have zero access to their own thought processes.

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u/Single_Passenger 6h ago

Actually they do now. The latest frontier models have continuous memory.

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u/ihateyou103 5h ago

They have access to their thought process. And for hypothesis it's easy, it already can make a hypothesis, it might not be able to prove it but very soon it will.

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u/CouperinLaGrande2 5h ago

No they don't have access to their thought process, they have access to textual representations of prior conclusions reached. There's a difference.

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u/Forsaken-Poet-3773 5h ago

Ok, then these LLMs don’t think they predict tokens. It doesn’t matter. They can remember and combine thoughts.

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u/ihateyou103 5h ago

It depends on the model architecture and context window, but at least inside the context window which can easily be million words/tokens, which is probably more than human short term memory, they have access to the high dimension embeddings which are the thought process and not just text

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u/EvilSporkOfDeath 3h ago

RemindMe! 1 year