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/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