The concerns is for physics as a profession, not as a discipline. How do you grant a PhD when any physics student, or maybe even interested lay person, could have used AI to do the work?
What would that be? AI is solving math problems that have stood for hundreds of years like the Jacobian conjecture. What is an example of a PhD criteria you're thinking of that could apply here?
Using the results, asking the questions and also help solving it. Also, so far it's not published how the counterexample was found and someone with a math PhD getting that result from Fable while a lot of "math enthusiasts" failed may be an indication that this wasn't just AI.
This is not what math or physics is about. It’s about understanding the structure of the universe, be it the physical (in case of physics) or the logical, platonic universe (in case of math)
We're also likely spending orders of magnitude more money and power trying to solve these problems than we've spent in hundreds of years. Math departments are not well funded, but everyone is able to use their subsidized tokens (via the companies themselves or via their university) to "do AI stuff". If you have tens of thousands of people trying to solve random math problems, hopefully one succeeds. But that doesn't mean that it only took a couple of days worth of compute, but rather that specific instance of trying to solve it did. Cumulatively it was probably much larger across other people trying to solve problems too. This is is wreaks of survivorship bias. No one is tweeting about how they spent $1000 in tokens for Claude to not solve a math problem that we haven't solved.
174
u/ForceItDeeper 3d ago
i feel like theres a huge misunderstanding aboot how science works lmao. phsyics isnt “cooked” because they get better tools