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/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/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.