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ChatGPT spitballing fundamental physics theories

ramrajv.com

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Re: ChatGPT spitballing fundamental physics theories

#21

Post by l33tbro »

ramraj07 wrote: post #7
l33tbro wrote: post #4

It's certainly handy for summarising the existing corpus that we are unfamiliar with (though take acuracy with a grain of salt). Proposing new theories I'd be extremely skeptical of. It's just not what this thing is made to do.

It’s not gonna spew completely solid hypotheses but I can see how these ideas can be amazing seeds for us to pursue further. Importantly I asked it to think like Einstein. In exchanges I didn’t put here, it first just said Einstein would have worked on string theory if he were alive today. I reminded it that einsteins unique ability was to imaginatively think of completely new ideas. It then spewed these two topics.…

It's kind of weird. This technology is designed for the human to give the machine a prompt. What I like about your approach is that you're almost using it to create the inverse: the machine supplying a slightly fuzzy idea that could prompt you to take your research in new and unexpected directions.

Re: ChatGPT spitballing fundamental physics theories

#22

Post by supermatt »

I have been using ChatGPT as a Lithuanian language tutor.

It is surprisingly amazing - accurately (verified with a native speaker) conversing in Lithuanian with phrase level translations, explaining pronunciation, explaining clauses and cases, and is able to explain some grammatical concepts (usage of commas, etc) that I haven't found explained in English elsewhere.

Re: ChatGPT spitballing fundamental physics theories

#23

Post by arpowers »

I did this myself a few weeks ago,

while I don’t want to sound crazy…

I managed to get GPT to mathematically derive a formula and calculate actual results to explain some well known anomalies in physics.

I’m aware that gpt might be imagining and contriving false conclusions …

but I have no doubt that ai will be moving physics forward within the decade

Re: ChatGPT spitballing fundamental physics theories

#24

Post by tom-from-july »

I love this so much. Like, most of the concepts and ideas it refers to are not completely new ideas (don’t ask me were I heard about them), but it’s interesting to hear them not proposed as a solution to a specific problem, but just based on the fact that they are thematically close to the works of an existing scientist. A little creepy though, like research from beyond the grave (move rights pending).

Non the less interesting though. I am currently researching into physics-informed neural networks for quantum problems, which are guided with differential equations. Maybe if you’d extend an LLM with an execution engine/numerical model, it’d be able to actually produce differential equations to undermine its hallucinated theories. From my short testing that is something ChatGPT (4) is not that good at. Or it’s just a generally a hard problem to produce novel differential equations

Re: ChatGPT spitballing fundamental physics theories

#25

Post by ChatGTP »

supermatt wrote: post #22

I have been using ChatGPT as a Lithuanian language tutor. It is surprisingly amazing - accurately (verified with a native speaker) conversing in Lithuanian with phrase level translations, explaining pronunciation, explaining clauses and cases, and is able to explain some grammatical concepts (usage of commas, etc) that I haven't found explained in English elsewhere.

I asked it to translate my resume recently, saw the word Python and or Linux stopped translating and stared opening a fake terminal and doing weird stuff, so YMMV.

My honest opinion is that very few people are clear on what the thing is actual good at, great at or bad at at this stage. We're still trying to find it's real use case.

IMO it's best for things you already know quite a bit about so at least you don't mess up hard. In other words, it seems like a more advanced ELIZA. Nearly everyone who has had a good time with it has used talk to it until they had a break through.

Re: ChatGPT spitballing fundamental physics theories

#27

Post by _nalply »

arpowers wrote: post #23

I did this myself a few weeks ago, while I don’t want to sound crazy… I managed to get GPT to mathematically derive a formula and calculate actual results to explain some well known anomalies in physics. I’m aware that gpt might be imagining and contriving false conclusions … but I have no doubt that ai will be moving physics forward within the decade

Perhaps.

Generative AI needs a way to receive feedback. AI learned to play chess by playing a lot, and the feedback was either winning, losing, or drawing.

If generative AI can repeatedly test physics theories faster than humans, then we may witness progress in physics. AI could generate thousands of theories and conduct experiments successfully, possibly leading to new physics models.

However, I am uncertain whether this will be achievable soon, particularly for theories requiring costly experiments.

A benefit could be that humans crave recognition for success, making papers less valuable. AI may be more willing to take risks and document its failures than humans.

Re: ChatGPT spitballing fundamental physics theories

#28

Post by raydiatian »

I don’t know how much people listen to Sabine Hossenfelder’s opinions on things, but the article mentioned the age old desire for unification and symmetry, and frankly, I have to point out how aestheticist, unscientific, biased, and frankly typical it is for an LLM trained on modern (theoretical physics) conversations to go in search of unification. I know AI isn’t doing new science any time soon (or even this decade) but what I do think is that it’s probably dumb to bias your AI to go hunting for grand unified theories when what it should be looking for is unanswered questions grounded in first principles and proposing candidate experiments to discover the shape of data behind those doors, AND ONLY THEN proposing theories.

The modern mechanics revolutions of the 20th century demonstrated that our intuitions were completely mismatched for what the truth was. Planck himself rejected the notion of curve fitting which ultimately birthed energy quanta. It’s OUR macro universe that is the weird one, a strange corner case of quantum reality in the absurdly large.

Re: ChatGPT spitballing fundamental physics theories

#29

Post by ShamelessC »

arpowers wrote: post #23

I did this myself a few weeks ago, while I don’t want to sound crazy… I managed to get GPT to mathematically derive a formula and calculate actual results to explain some well known anomalies in physics. I’m aware that gpt might be imagining and contriving false conclusions … but I have no doubt that ai will be moving physics forward within the decade

> while I don’t want to sound crazy…

Doesn't the author do something similar in the article? Why are you worried people will think you are crazy?

Re: ChatGPT spitballing fundamental physics theories

#30

Post by whatshisface »

This is really awful, the text is completely content-free but it's got everyone who's not a domain expert hooked.

I didn't know whether ChatGPT's ability to babble convincingly was going to cause trouble or be a funny quirk that we all knew about and worked around, but this thread is really making it look like the pessimists were right about it. The problem is that it gets past many people's filters because its phrasing sends a lot of intelligent/rational/professional signals, as it was engineered to do. Nobody is used to picking smart-sounding text apart word by word to make sure they agree with it, except maybe academics, and that's the vulnerability it reaches us through.

I also think that OpenAI got human nature backwards when they trained it to hedge on everything it said - everybody knows that people who constantly demure are the most reliable! A safe chatbot would sound pushy, like a bad salesman or an ideological agent; like something incapable of self-questioning.

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