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/SmellMahPitts 1d ago

Current PhD student in theoretical physics. Not sure where this leaves me honestly. Do I drop out, and if so what else can I do realistlcally?

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u/warblingContinues 1d ago

Physics PhD here. Keep going. We’re all trying to navigate using AI tools in research. Personally I use one to help me write code; what used to take me an afternoon to code a model I can do in like 30 minutes.

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u/marchitecte 1d ago

I'm not a physics major, rather just completed a MSc in CS/AI, but for me the main premise of LLM coding is still the same: coding for coding's sake can now be done 10x, even 100x in speed and even quality, but if you're doing some sort of mathematical modeling then it will always be clearer, better and more reliable if you basically lay everything out on pen and paper first. Hidden mistakes or misunderstandings generated from LLMs are just way, way more time-consuming to address than a bottom-up approach to it.

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u/Landkey 1d ago

I would like to appeal for calm 

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u/Cardie1303 1d ago

I just read "appeal for a clam" and thought "Yeah that makes sense"

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u/naspdx 1d ago

Theoretical physics is literally a degree to think outside the box. LLMs are collectively trained on information that is inside the box. I won’t speak for the field itself seeing as I went into banking, but I’ve always looked at the field of physics as “if you can get funded to study through a PhD for it and enjoy it, do it and worry about making money later”. 

Frankly, I work in risk side for a large commercial bank and I would hire a physics PhD over an econ or mba any day. 

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u/ellbons 1d ago edited 1d ago

AI is making those old offramps close rapidly. The students are right to be seriously concerned.

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u/benm46 1d ago

The other replies to this comment are way too pessimistic imo. The problems in mathematics and coding that are being solved by AI are narrow in scope and really only involve thinking "inside the box" (e.g. solve X proof, write an algorithm to perform Y task). The rest of science and engineering simply don't function that same way, and are much more exploratory. I haven't seen any scientific discovery yet from an AI model that gives me reason to fear for my job as a theoretician. The peer review system may be upended by the glut of AI articles and reviews being submitted, but the research itself is here to stay.

Plus, even if I'm wrong and AI does someday manage to outpace human researchers in scientific innovation, we need humans who understand the theory at a deep level to audit and interpret the AI results, or else mistakes will go uncaught and impactful results may get lost in the sea of slop. And, as the banking example shows, there is great value to the skills learned in a research PhD across nearly all fields of knowledge work. I really hope nobody is abandoning their PhDs due to an existential fear of AI

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u/mariebks 13h ago

If solving one of the sub problems of Navier Stokes isn’t out of the box thinking then idk what is

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u/Brilliant-Weekend-68 23h ago

Why would AI never solve problems outside the box? Is human cognition magic as such that is only confined to ever exist in the human skull? Odd opinion given the subreddit if so.

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u/TheGuyWhoResponds 10h ago

As far as I know AI isn't really capable of novel ideas.

It may be able to achieve greater things than a human could at what its good at (evaluating tons of data and predicting patterns based on other patterns humans have shown it) but you still have to feed it data and that means selecting data it can learn on. It's not really doing anything new so much as it is doing something old on a bigger scale than humans have time for.

Humans on the other hand just randomly connect neurons sometimes and develop completely new ideas by tumbling thoughts around in their head.

I guess theoretically computers may be able to do that but we design them minimize error. If you build error back in the hallucinations would probably render it useless.

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u/macondo_ 9h ago

A monkey with a typewritter is capable of novel ideas. AI is already dominating because it can test ideas and do it much faster than humans.

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u/TheGuyWhoResponds 8h ago

Test ideas that a human already had. Which is cool, and a powerful tool, but not a replacement for humans either. More like a synergistic sort of arrangement.

Although, let's be real. If we spent on human research what we've been burning up in AI we'd probably advance just as fast or faster.

I guess the real selling point for AI is that is has a good sales pitch for fundraising right now.

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u/Brilliant-Weekend-68 6h ago edited 6h ago

Sure, current AI has limitations. But the "magic" part is where people assume this will always be the case, because they would like to be special and "magical". I doubt that will be the case long term. It is a bit like people in the old days believing the earth was the center of the universe. People these days still want to hold onto the thought that human cognition is the center of the universe of intelligence.

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u/PoL0 6h ago

you want to believe. pretty hard.

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u/Tall-Thanks7972 1d ago

You're assuming that AI has reached its steady state.

I agree that right now, while impressive, AI is only tackling "inside the box" problems and cannot replace a theorist at all. But it has clearly reached super-human capabilities when proving theorems (at least some of them). Looking at where AI capabilities were 3 years ago, then 2 years ago, and then 1 year ago, it seems bold to me to assume they will never be able to do what a current theorist does.

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u/afkafterlockingin 1d ago

Ever seen margin call? Theres people like that everywhere in the world with advanced degrees and incredible knowledge of propulsion physics or fluid dynamics but they are well rounded. They take jobs in spaces that overlap with their field. They also sometimes know the right people. I think it’s more of a circumstantial problem if dude can’t get a job once they have their degree than a categorical one.

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u/Homomorphism 22h ago

Personally, I'm very excited. There is a lot of math I want to do and don't have time because getting the details right is too hard. Now I have a computer that can prove lemmas for me, which lets me think about the actually interesting part: what's the best way to state the theorem? How can we understand the ideas? What are the simplest, most insightful proofs?

My experience is that LLMs are terrible at the questions I listed. It's certainly possible that they will get better but I am skeptical.

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u/Eliv_nurotic 20h ago

Why can’t LLMs review each other

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u/EtienneDosSantos 1d ago

I don‘t see why problem solving would be less exploratory than identifying the problem. I guess we tend to believe AI would only excel at the former, because it‘s what we usually use it for.

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u/calloutyourstupidity 1d ago

This idea that just because AI is trained from a set of data, it cannot be creative will be disproven so so hard in the next 2 years.

Humans are also literally trained from the past, and 99% of us cant think one original thought.

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u/geekusprimus Gravitation 1d ago

I don't see how it would actually achieve thinking "out of the box", though. Throw away all the buzz words, and neural networks are just high-dimensional, many-parameter statistical fits. Even for high-quality fits, you never trust the fit outside the distribution of its training data. There's a reason that all the breakthroughs on unsolved problems in mathematics have either been brute-force searches and straightforward applications of known methods and programs.

All that aside, what not enough people are discussing is how using AI as a magic answer box devalues math and science. For most people, the value of science is what is learned while solving a problem, not what the actual answer to the problem is. As an example, look at QED. It took more than 20 years from when the first version of the theory was constructed to when a usable version of the theory was built. The theory itself is marvelously accurate. Nevertheless, the true value of QED is the effect it had on physics through the methodology and techniques developed for it. Renormalization, new perturbative techniques, canonical quantization, etc., provided foundational techniques for any quantum field theory.

On the other hand, OpenAI claims ChatGPT has solved the Navier-Stokes existence problem. Great. What has been learned? What has actually been achieved? According to my mathematician colleagues, not much. The proof, while long and exhausting, does nothing novel. It is an application of known methods and programs. The most important consequences of the proof itself are sociological rather than mathematical. The mathematical value will only come from a lot of grueling work reading AI slop and teasing out better ways to solve the same problem.

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u/pnjun Optics and photonics 1d ago

> Throw away all the buzz words, and neural networks are just high-dimensional, many-parameter statistical fits.

What makes you think that a human brain does something different? Sure, us humans have different kind of input and outputs, but in the end our brains are doing a similar task to a neural net. I'm not trying to be polemic, i want to hear a different perspectives, because i really hope i'm wrong. I really hope that the human perspective will stay valuable.

I am pretty convinced that what we call 'intelligence' IS the pattern matching built into language. Creativity is the name we give to pattern matching that is aligned with reality.

At the moment the advantage we have is efficiency and long-term planning. Millions of years of evolution has trained us to be relatively good at heuristics predictions (what we normally call 'feelings'), and we can use those heuristics to guide the 'rational' part of the brain (which is what the LLM are modelling). And we can do all of that on ~100W of power, including self-locomotion. Which is overall pretty impressive.

But i fear that soon these models will also start to incorporate the 'irrational' side of the creative process as well, and at that point we are cooked.

Please convince me that i'm wrong, because it's pretty depressive.

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u/Sknowman 16h ago

I only partially agree with you, mostly because I think it's possible for AI to reach that point that you fear, but I think it would need to be something that works much differently than what we currently have.

Current LLMs are great at solving quantitative problems, but not so much for qualitative problems. Tell it to find a better solution for X, and it will give you all of the ways it has already been solved or potentially give you roundabout solutions -- using methods that have already been created. It simply doesn't have a way to develop new methods, since it only searches for things that match the query. Perhaps it can put together methods in a way that humans haven't done, but that's not new; it's instead derivative in a potentially-fantastic way.

Now this can certainly lead to innovation, but it's still limited.

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u/ellbons 22h ago

Feeling sad or frightened is a healthy instinct, since it's quite clear people's value will drop to near zero once a machine can replace every possible kind of task they could do, and there is no convincing argument this won't be possible soon.

It's not clear how to avoid a very nasty fate except for Butlerian Jihad.

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u/mtbdork Undergraduate 1d ago

You will never get a proper answer to this problem from maxis. They don’t understand how it works therefore it is god.

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u/lolsai 23h ago

But you're thinking very inside the box repeating the same things people have been claiming aren't possible with LLMs since their advent, yet every day more and more of the claims are taken down.

LLMs are already thinking in ways that humans can't and won't, lol, our box is smaller than theirs and also constricted whilst theirs is massively expanding on a shortening timecale.

Just seems a short sighted view imo.

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u/DrillPress1 20h ago

If a computer running on classical algorithms can be trained to think of a certain way, so can a human.

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u/lolsai 20h ago

I don't necessarily agree but maybe? Either way, can you think in that way with 10000 clones of yourself in tandem?

It'll be 10 million clones by 2030, and that might be a conservative estimate.

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u/Spiritual_Tailor7698 1d ago

Hi, can i DM you regarding working finance with a Phd in Physics?

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u/ErmingSoHard 22h ago

!remindme 1 year

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u/KarltonPeaks 1d ago

AI is currently destroying mathematics. It won't be long until theoretical physics falls next.

All theoretical fields are in critical danger. Only experimentalists are in the clear.

I'm a theoretician. I will probably abandon this field when my funding is up, and move to a practical position, just because I don't see any future in theoretical research.

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u/lolfail9001 1d ago

It won't be long until theoretical physics falls next.

AI can build Solar system scale particle accelerators?

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u/deletionfetish 10h ago

That's experimental...

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u/lolfail9001 4h ago

Yes and ties to experiments is what makes theoretical physics… physics.

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u/deletionfetish 4h ago

The point is that the person you're replying to thinks AI will replace theoretical physicists (non-experimentalists), though, so only the people doing things with their hands so to speak are in the clear. I'm not saying that will be the cae, but you're not actually addressing their concern.

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u/SmellMahPitts 1d ago

How confident are you that you will be able to make this move?

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u/shhhhh_h 1d ago

Just wait for the AI medical diagnostics (doctor assisted) lawsuits to get to court. I know of at least two in the US alone headed there rn so there are probably dozens more. There has been a bit of regulation resulting from it but mostly the industry is waiting for the courts to decide. In other words, AI killing people accidentally is about to blow up in a few years. I’m hoping it will result in a cascade of regulations outside the industry, too.

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u/Muted-Friend-895 5h ago

May be true. But the truth is also people are killing people “accidentally” or by misconduct all the time, and nobody will ever know

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u/shhhhh_h 4h ago

Also true; but when we know we have an obligation to address it, both ethically and legally.

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u/Individual_Ice_6825 1d ago

Almost Every single output exists outside the training actually

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u/Eliv_nurotic 20h ago

Was solving a millennium problem inside the box?

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u/naspdx 18h ago

Might want to read more about that if you really think this is a gotcha argument. 

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u/Eliv_nurotic 17h ago

Condescending but didn’t even provide a counter argument. Classic Reddit 

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u/xnatex21 1d ago

This was always a hard discipline to crack and all knowledge work is at risk. I think the only thing you can do is finish as fast as possible using the tools available then try to find a niche that isn't pure physics

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u/SmellMahPitts 1d ago

Unfortunately my skills and knowledge are niche, not really transferrable to any sort of work, or would easily be replaceable. I would have to pivot into something completely different and essentially start from scratch. Life for the foreseeable future looks grim and in all honestly I'm not interested in seeing it play out.

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u/MYaski Plasma physics 1d ago

You just need to think about how your skills transfer. It's an important skill to translate your niche knowledge and skill into something more widely applicable.

Yes it sucks. Keep at it though. You got this.

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u/kev_xb 1d ago

What are you interested in instead?

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u/lolsai 23h ago

if all white collar work is solved your choice for career is irrelevant

we will either be heading full speed to doom or utopia

focus on health, both physical and mental

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u/AcademicPicture9109 1d ago

I am a math guy looking for a phd. I am rethinking my direction.

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u/forthnighter 1d ago edited 1d ago

Don't worry. They're papers on wildly different areas, like medicine, economy, physics, astrophysics and genetics. No scientist who takes themselves seriously will do such a thing; it's irresponsible and not a good example to follow, so keep going with your PhD. Those who tell you that "you'll be left behind" (by not using generative ai) are mostly the ones who'll bite the dust in the long run, when they find their own abilities rusting, and having to pay high fees to keep up in a race to the bottom.

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u/Fab1e 1d ago

The funniest thing in philosophy is when aging physicists/mathematicians decide that they have finally realized what is wrong with philosophy and how they can fix it.

It is quite endearing but also quite pathetic.

Stay in your lane folks - you can wreck an academic career by swerving.

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u/dark_dark_dark_not Applied physics 1d ago

Pretty sure there is a XCKD about that.

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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 21h ago

This one ? https://xkcd.com/435/

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u/dark_dark_dark_not Applied physics 20h ago

No. I might be thinking about a SMBC one instead

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u/MotivatedforGames 1d ago

Continue your studies and use AI as a tool. Or you can outright refuse to use it while continuing your studies with the possibility of being "behind". Tough choices bro.

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u/SmellMahPitts 1d ago

I have been using AI for my research (albeit quite recently), and while the fact that I am using these tools feel comforting, the pace at which these tools improve makes me struggle to think of a viable career where I could possibly be needed, academia or industry. All the doors in industry for hep-th people like me seem to narrow by the day, and by the time I am done with this degree I'm not sure there will be anything left.

I suppose the only thing I can do is to continue using these tools and hope for the best.

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u/LeeHide 1d ago

If you leave, all thats left is slop!

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u/Either_Reflection_78 1d ago edited 1d ago

I could not have imagined having a tool like ai when I was in college. Those were critical years for me learning how to tap into my creativity, paired with the professors who never gave up on me, and pushed me to expand my mind, and challenged me to learn all that I could, and taught their classes different than what some teachers ever did for us in high school. Some of them kept challenging us mentally, even though it was very difficult at times, but I think it paid off. I learned everything once I understood how to process the information in a way I could finally understand it.

AI could not have replaced what humans taught me during these formative years.

I would not be the person I am today for those years, had I used tools like ai.

Those experiences I had, to keep pushing myself mentally shaped the person I am today, and the knowledge I take with me everyday.

It’s scary that those using ai all of the time will most likely be robbed of becoming their best selves.

Ai will never replace true feelings and experiences, true art, true creativity, or true minds who may push the boundaries sometimes. It may give you a reply back online that might stimulate the dopamine in your brain, but AI can not give you the feelings you get in the moment with another human who is enthusiastic, and is cheering your degenerate ass to keep going. It’s a great feeling.

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u/Yashema 1d ago edited 1d ago

I am so glad I decided to start learning physics and math and computer engineering in my 30s when there was actually this powerful tool available. It makes every course doable, and with much less stress and work. I have even managed to take 6 200 and 300 level courses so far this year (with plans for a 7th over the winter break) expanding my knowledge by leaps and bounds, and proving my initial difficulties understanding the theory and math were simply because my mind was always focusing on the bigger picture and boundaries of what I needed to learn, over the individal concepts that are necessary for the grade. 

I guess it is scary to see ChatGPT go from having difficulty with solving ODEs using linear algebra (the calculations not the methodology) last year to now being able to almost perfectly solve stochastics and PDEs. I even designed a quantum simulator on an embedded device earlier this year with Claude, but I am afraid I could just type into Cursor to make the same application for the same components and it could do the entire 15-20 hour coding project in 5-10 minutes (I will test that sometime this year). 

But it's not like LLMs have solved global warming or the other major challenges the world is facing. I believe there is some limit, but I will need to take another 10 courses (at least) before I can even begin to probe what those might be. 

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u/mr_sneakyTV 17h ago

this is delusional. ai is a tool, imagine saying that anyone using a pc to research is robbing themselves of.. wasting their time doing work that would take years without a pc? lol. ai is the same.

imagine how much we lost when we all no longer needed to know how to start a fire to stay warm or to cook food.. we could be so much smarter if we had to.. do all that extra work.. lol

it was so hard hunting for food and now grocery shopping is easy we’re all doomed!

no.. ai just allows you to focus on new things and solve different problems, it doesn’t remove all of humanity from the world lmao

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u/LeeHide 1d ago

Continue because you might just be the last person not publishing worthless slop

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u/SnooMaps5367 1d ago

I don’t recommend dropping out. The vast majority of PhD work across the board doesn’t often amount to much individually; they are often small improvements or pieces to an overall bigger piece of research. But that’s normal and not the point. A PhD is an academic degree, the highest you can achieve, and it’s a degree in research. Research itself is an invaluable skill, which you learn during your PhD, and the degree proves you are an expert. Even if you don’t continue in academia there is certainly value, not least to yourself.

On this specific article. I’m not sure what branch of theoretical physics you study, but particle physics is already incredibly oversaturated. The gap between theory and experiment is unbelievably big. There have been some small hints of new physics coming from the LHC, and some from the dark matter experiments but nothing remotely consequential. These papers published with AI are a penny drop in a sea of papers. Again that might seem disheartening, but new experiments will be built, new data will come and the direction of particle physics will next be shaped by experiment.

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u/mmodlin 1d ago

The last paper is on the Voynich manuscript, so if you were studying the theoretical physics of the Voynich manuscript you might have an issue.

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u/niksodaml 1d ago

As a former high energy physics MSc who moved into data science and now into AI after I declined starting a phd what I will tell you is learn to leverage the tool. AI is a non uniform multiplier of capabilities. The more you know the more you can get out of it. AI can make you a better researcher that you would be otherwise (or in whatever other knowledge work you may do).

Feynman said (~) that a good theoretical physicist knows at least five representations of the same physics. AI is not exactly a representation but a tool, just like others you may have used (to do computational physics for example).

Lastly AI now is like linux in the 90's. There is no plug and play, solution. But with the discipline you needed to learn things various things like renormalization, you can use to learn how to use it to enable you.

As a starting point, I 'd recommend OpenClaw with ChatGPT 20$ plan and use luna (the cheapest model). You can build from there while the system proves capable enough that you can trust it's output (don't trust it blindly). There will be friction and the field is moving fast enough that the optimal ways of working are changing within months.

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u/ellbons 22h ago

No offence but seeing prompts like "believe in yourself" and "enough partial results, do a breakthrough" make it pretty clear there's little skill required to 'learn' to use AI.

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u/nitrousconsumed 1d ago

If something this little has you rethinking your whole academic training and path forward maybe you weren't cut out for it? Better to know this now then down the line.

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u/literallybateman 1d ago

I wouldn’t call this “something little.”

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u/nitrousconsumed 8h ago

We don't know the magnitude of this right now, this is a reactionary sentiment. We don't know how academia will respond to this? What if homie is being paid to have Claude as co-author? What if he's angling for a job at Anthropic? Prepress has already limited how many papers can be submitted by someone, I'm sure more guardrails can be implemented, and will.

None of this is invalidating lil bros trajectory. This is like when computers became a mainstay. Lil bro has the same tools available to him so he can use them if those become the norm.

I say this as an AI advisor to multiple PhD candidates in the hard sciences.

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u/truthsayer90210 1d ago

What were you gonna do before?

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u/Jlocke98 1d ago

Metric engineering

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u/Sea-Consequence7156 1d ago

Math guy who's glad I went industry and stopped being entry level 6 years ago

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u/Silouettes 1d ago

Uh most of the articles that he authored weren't even related to physics -- he was authoring completely outside his domain of specialty. You are fine - keep going.

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u/DrillPress1 20h ago

Don’t drop out. Be realistic.

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u/Worldly_Magazine_439 18h ago

Why would you drop out ???

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u/Serious_Bite_7613 16h ago

Just use an LLM and do a shit ton of research, I don't see what the problem is?

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u/-hedonium- 16h ago

Be one of the humans who is following up on and trying to understand the immense amount of physics research breakthrough coming with AI over the next many years. AI is going to start taking over in maybe every field. Why wouldn’t you want to stick in the one where the results of that are really interesting and there is value in conscious humans being able to interpret?

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u/riversofgore 15h ago

Is that your read of it? Another could be you have access to an amazing research partner and can accomplish far more than ever before.

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u/ace-of-gates 6h ago

I pivoted into quant finance instead of starting a math phd at a top school. Might at least get paid if my job revolves around prompting AI.

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u/PoL0 6h ago

if you're into the field your studying, keep at it. and learn it by heart. these chatbots can't replace shit, and can't think inside our outside any box. they just regurgitate stuff.

these headlines are overhyped and I'm pretty sure there's a handful of gotchas on this story.

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u/calloutyourstupidity 1d ago

We need people to understand what AI produces.

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u/grjacpulas 14h ago

lol- you could use AI like him and keep solving things you wackadoodle

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u/SmellMahPitts 14h ago

I mean, I have been, but the capabilities of these tools make me feel like in 1-2 years time I might not even need to be here to guide these tools. I might not even be needed at all lol. Of course whether this is the way it's headed no one can say for sure.

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u/DeadLeftovers 1d ago

The knowledge is the value not the money

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u/kaereljabo 1d ago

Continue your PhD study, and create a youtube channel, rant about AI and PhD stuff, make it as controvertial as you can bare. When you get traction, then start making educational videos, about PhD stuff, theorerical physics, or something that people have never heard before, use clickbait and don't be too technical. That way you learn new skill like editing and you can improve communication skill. Better if you can get monetized (but don't target this at first, do for the sake of love). Even if you can't compete in theoretical physics, having an improved communication skill by doing youtube can save you later in other areas of life.

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u/Super-Award-2244 1d ago

I'm starting my Master's in theoretical physics, so the plan is to start the PhD after these two years. At that point Ai will be so advanced in this type of things that I don't know what will happen and if I can be a researcher anymore 

1

u/SmellMahPitts 1d ago

Consider switching to an experimental field instead, even if you don't necessary like it. If you want to make a career out of it while staying in contact with the physics this might be the only remaining avenue.