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GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

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Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#81

Post by nozzlegear »

famouswaffles wrote: post #49
nozzlegear wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hence Open AI having an author credit. How much precedence is there for machines or tools getting an author credit in research? Genuine question, I don't actually know. Would we give an author credit to e.g. a chimpanzee if it happened to circle the right page of a text book while working with researchers, leading them to a eureka moment?

>How much precedence is there for machines or tools getting an author credit in research? Well what do you think ? Do the authors (or a single symbolic one) of pytorch or numpy or insert typically get credits on papers that utilize them heavily? Well Clearly these prominent institutions thought GPT's contribution significant enough to warrant an Open AI credit. >Would we give an author credit to e.g. a chimpanzee if…

> Well what do you think ? Do the authors (or a single symbolic one) of pytorch or numpy or insert typically get credits on papers that utilize them heavily ?

I don't know! That's why I asked.

> Well Clearly these prominent institutions thought GPT's contribution significant enough to warrant an Open AI credit.

Contribution is a fitting word, I think, and well chosen. I'm sure OpenAI's contribution was quite large, quite green and quite full of Benjamins.

> Cool Story. Good thing that's not what happened so maybe we can do away with all these pointless non sequiturs yeah ? If you want to have a good faith argument, you're welcome to it, but if you're going to go on these nonsensical tangents, it's best we end this here.

It was a genuine question. What's the difference between a chimpanzee and a computer? Neither are humans and neither should be credited as authors on a research paper, unless the institution receives a fat stack of cash I guess. But alas Jane Goodall wasn't exactly flush with money and sycophants in the way OpenAI currently is.

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#82

Post by amelius »

outlace wrote: post #11

The headline may make it seem like AI just discovered some new result in physics all on its own, but reading the post, humans started off trying to solve some problem, it got complex, GPT simplified it and found a solution with the simpler representation. It took 12 hours for GPT pro to do this. In my experience LLM’s can make new things when they are some linear combination of existing things but I haven’t been to g…

Just wait until LLMs are fast and cheap enough to be run in a breadth first search kind of way, with "fuzzy" pruning.

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#83

Post by nozzlegear »

slopusila wrote: post #75
nozzlegear wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hence Open AI having an author credit. How much precedence is there for machines or tools getting an author credit in research? Genuine question, I don't actually know. Would we give an author credit to e.g. a chimpanzee if it happened to circle the right page of a text book while working with researchers, leading them to a eureka moment?

it's called ethics and research integrity. not crediting GPT would be a form of misrepresentation

Would it? I think there's a difference between "the researchers used ChatGPT" and "one of the researchers literally is ChatGPT." The former is the truth, and the latter is the misrepresentation in my eyes.

I have no problem with the former and agree that authors/researchers must note when they use AI in their research.

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#84

Post by terminalbraid »

RandomLensman wrote: post #36
bpodgursky wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to be rude but like, maybe you should pre-register some statement like "LLMs will not be able to do X" in some concrete domain, because I suspect your goalposts are shifting without you noticing. We're talking about significant contributions to theoretical physics. You can nitpick but honestly go back to your expectations 4 years ago and think — would I be pretty surprised and impressed if an AI could do…

I don't know enought about theoretical physics: what makes it a significant contribution there?

It's a nontrivial calculation valid for a class of forces (e.g. QCD) and apparently a serious simplification to a specific calculation that hadn't been completed before. But for what it's worth, I spent a good part of my physics career working in nucleon structure and have not run across the term "single minus amplitudes" in my memory. That doesn't necessarily mean much as there's a very broad space work like this takes place in and some of it gets extremely arcane and technical.

One way I gauge the significance of a theory paper are the measured quantities and physical processes it would contribute to. I see none discussed here which should tell you how deep into math it is. I personally would not have stopped to read it on my arxiv catch-up

https://arxiv.org/list/hep-th/new

Maybe to characterize it better, physicists were not holding their breath waiting for this to get done.

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#86

Post by emp17344 »

Davidzheng wrote: post #13
emil-lp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't solve it, it simply found that it had been solved in a publication and that the list of open problems wasn't updated.

My understanding is there's been around 10 erdos problems solved by GPT by now. Most of them have been found to be either in literature or a very similar problem was solved in literature. But one or two solutions are quite novel. https://github.com/teorth/erdosproblems/wiki/AI-contribution... may be useful

Some of these were initially hyped as novel solutions, and then were quietly downgraded after it was discovered the solutions weren’t actually novel.

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#87

Post by epolanski »

square_usual wrote: post #64

It's interesting to me that whenever a new breakthrough in AI use comes up, there's always a flood of people who come in to handwave away why this isn't actually a win for LLMs. Like with the novel solutions GPT 5.2 has been able to find for erdos problems - many users here (even in this very thread!) think they know more about this than Fields medalist Terence Tao, who maintains this list showing that, yes, LLMs hav…

It's an obvious tension created by the title.

The reality is: "GPT 5.2 found a more general and scalable form of an equation, after crunching for 12 hours supervised by 4 experts in the field".

Which is equivalent to taking some of the countless niche algorithms out there and have few experts in that algo have LLMs crunch tirelessly till they find a better formula. After same experts prompted it in the right direction and with the right feedback.

Interesting? Sure. Speaks highly of AI? Yes.

Does it suggest that AI is revolutionizing theoretical physics on its own like the title does? Nope.

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#88

Post by steveklabnik »

nozzlegear wrote: post #35
famouswaffles wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this worked for 12 hours to derive the simplified formula along with its proof then it guided itself and made significant contributions by any useful definition of the word, hence Open AI having an author credit.

> hence Open AI having an author credit. How much precedence is there for machines or tools getting an author credit in research? Genuine question, I don't actually know. Would we give an author credit to e.g. a chimpanzee if it happened to circle the right page of a text book while working with researchers, leading them to a eureka moment?

Not exactly the same thing, but I know of at least two professors that would try to list their cats as co-authors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._D._C._Willard

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Knorozov

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#90

Post by CooCooCaCha »

randomtoast wrote: post #53
outlace wrote: post #11

The headline may make it seem like AI just discovered some new result in physics all on its own, but reading the post, humans started off trying to solve some problem, it got complex, GPT simplified it and found a solution with the simpler representation. It took 12 hours for GPT pro to do this. In my experience LLM’s can make new things when they are some linear combination of existing things but I haven’t been to g…

> but I haven’t been to get them to do something totally out of distribution yet from first principles Can humans actually do that? Sometimes it appears as if we have made a completely new discovery. However, if you look more closely, you will find that many events and developments led up to this breakthrough, and that it is actually an improvement on something that already existed. We are always building on the shou…

Depends on what you think is valid.

The process you’re describing is humans extending our collective distribution through a series of smaller steps. That’s what the “shoulders of giants” means. The result is we are able to do things further and further outside the initial distribution.

So it depends on if you’re comparing individual steps or just the starting/ending distributions.

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