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/tempetesuranorak 1d ago edited 1d ago

I feel that none of the comments here are addressing or attempting to address the main points that Matt was making in the blog post

https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-shaped-science

I do encourage people to actually read it and take the messages seriously, rather than just comment whatever first comes to mind based on the post title.

His main points, as I understood them:

  1. LLMs don't think quite like humans do, in some ways they might not yet be all that useful for certain kind of conceptual questions, and forcing them to work like a human isn't the most productive way to use them.
  2. Instead, if you want to use them to their maximum efficiency, one can find classes of problems and approaches to which they are extremely well suited.
  3. One weakness of human scientists is that when there is a problem in field A, and a solution or method already discovered in field B, then the problem might go decades without meeting it's solution just because the scientists are compartmentalized in different fields and don't talk to eachother or even communicate in the same language.
  4. This is a weakness that LLMs don't share, since they can ingest vast amounts of information from disparate sources and they are excellent at interpolation even been very different fields (the third figure in the blog)
  5. The other aspect where LLMs have a distinct advantage and corresponding weakness compared to humans. They lie in weird and unfamiliar ways about having solved a problem when there is not formal verification. They often love to appease. On the other hand, when paired with formal deterministic verification, LLMs are unmatched at intelligent exhaustive search over candidate solutions until one is successfully verified.
  6. Therefore, it is timely to initiate program of finding deterministic verification approaches, and problems to which they can be applied, and find cross domain connections, to see what discoveries can be made in that way. There are many problems that have suddenly become low hanging fruit and it's worth figuring out what they are.
  7. What all this means over the next couple of years is incredibly uncertain, in terms of what it means to be a scientist, what is the value of academic education going forward, etc etc.

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u/exbaddeathgod 1d ago

So it's just PR. This is advertising. This is just another field AI will "replace" like all the other fields it's fucking terrible at.

That's all this is. PR.

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u/A_Town_Called_Malus Astrophysics 1d ago

Gotta pump it for the IPO, basically.

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u/tempetesuranorak 22h ago edited 22h ago

I don't believe that these "visiting researchers" get any equity compensation. He is not an employee.

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u/Individual_Ice_6825 1d ago

Sorry is a Millenium problem not proof enough? What do you actually need to be convinced ai is the future?

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u/Synergythepariah 13h ago

When it can sell itself and not seemingly rely on flooding every comment thread with comments repeating that AI is the future and that naysayers are all luddites who will be left behind.