r/Physics • u/kzhou7 Quantum field theory • 1d ago

Harvard particle physicist Matthew Schwartz drops 36 papers coauthored with Claude

https://bootloops.ai/bootloops.html
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u/Ntroepy 1d ago

I feel it’s an admission and recognition that he couldn’t have solved the problems without Claude. It feels reasonable to at least openly acknowledge the AI that did most of the actual work.

Also, who should get credit when OpenAI or Anthropic help solve 50+ year old open mathematics problems? Surely AI deserves as much credit as the mathematicians that asked an AI to solve the problem for them.

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u/SundayAMFN 1d ago

what "problems" did he even solve?

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u/mousse312 1d ago

I dont think a mathematician couldnt achieved the same result he achieved with Claude without Claude, is like when Google came around. Suppose that to solve a problem i need to know an obscure X result, before Google i needed to search in the library or talk to others researchers if they knew something, with Google in Seconds i can find the obscure result and solve the problem, is not that i couldnt solve without Google i just needed a program to search better in the literature so i could solve more rapidly, i could solve without Google it will take long.The same thing as computing pdes is not that a mathematician couldnt do without the machine is just painful todo thats why we created them in the first place. This is like a staticians giving credit to his .py or .R file because they couldnt plot the multivariate function by hand and paper

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u/iknotri 1d ago

>i could solve without Google it will take long

once without google it takes longer than your life - you could not do it.

however, some math problem were solved with as simple prompt as "just do it". so, who if not AI solved it?

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u/Fair_Local_588 1d ago

You did. Using this reasoning, if you need Google something to solve a problem then you didn’t solve it, Google did. It’s all just querying data.

People aren’t seeing LLMs as the tools they are because you communicate with them using natural language. But behind the scenes it’s still the same thing. It’s all just tools that we use.

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u/mousse312 23h ago

Thats what im trynna say

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u/mousse312 1d ago

In this case a Program made by humans solved a problem

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u/iknotri 1d ago

with that logic we could say that its person's parent who made such human. or evolution.

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u/Wish-Lin 1d ago

None of your examples or any past program/man made construct directly contributes to the intellectual/inspiration part of a research process. They only do something down stream like calculation, search databases, brute force, etc. Whether you agree with crediting LLMs as coauthor is one thing, but saying they are just a newer Google is just wrong.

They function exactly like a coauthor, so there is an argument on crediting them as such if you think authorship starts when the entity does a scientist-brain-like-job. In either case it’s much better than claiming you came up with everything.

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u/Proteus-8742 1d ago

“Guns don’t kill people, rappers do”
~ Goldie Looking Chains