"Let's put 'GPT' in our paper to get clicks!"?
GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics
361–370 of 430 posts
Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics
#362The 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…
AI cough LLMs don't discover things they simply surface information that already existed.
Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics
#363[dead]
Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not a scientific historian, or even a physicist, but IMO relativity has a weak case for being a completely novel discovery. Critique of absolute time and space of Newtonian physics was already well underway, and much of the methodology for exploring this relativity (by way of gyroscopes, inertial reference frames, and synchronized mechanical clocks) were already in parlance. Many of the phenomena that relativity…
Right on with special relativity—Lorentz also was developing the theory and was a bit sour that Einstein got so much credit. Einstein basically said “what if special relativity were true for all of physics”, not just electromagnetism, and out dropped e=mc^2. It was a bold step but not unexplainable. As for general relativity, he spent several years working to learn differential geometry (which was well developed math…
If people want to study this, perhaps it makes more sense to do like we used to: don't include the "labels" of relativity into the training set and see if it comes up with it.
Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics
#365The 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…
AI cough LLMs don't discover things they simply surface information that already existed.
You're assuming there aren't "new things" latent inside currently existing information. That's definitely false, particulary for math/physics.
But it's worth thinking more about this. What gives humans the ability to discover "new things"? I would say it's due to our interaction with the universe via our senses, and not due to some special powers intrinsic to our brains that LLMs lack. And the thing is, we can feed novel measurements to LLMs (or, eventually, hook them up to camera feeds to "give them senses")
Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Random anonymous HN driveby claiming something that'd be horrible PR; or the coauthors on the GPT-5.2 paper...and the belief OpenAI isn't aggressively stupid, especially after earlier negative press....gotta say, going with the coauthors, after seeing their credentials.
I think you're misunderstanding my claim. There's no scandal here, just run-of-the-mill academic politicking. I fully believe that ChatGPT did the work they say it did, but that it deserves about as much credit as Mathematica does in "deriving a new result".
Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics
#367I talked about basic principles of QM, gravity, time and relativity with Claude, then talked about implications of that, and claude came up with the idea that mass causes time and gravity as emergent properties that only affect macro scale objects, QM particles do not have to obey either of them, and this explains the double slit experiment, the delayed choice experiment, 'spooky action at a distance', and other aspects of entanglement.
Basically, if you are small enough you can move forwards and backwards in time, from the moment you were put into a superposition, or entangled, until you interact with an object too large to ignore the emergent effects of time and gravity. This is 'being observed' and 'collapsing the wave function'. You occupy all possible positions in space as defined by the probability of you being there. Once observed, you move forward in linear time again and the last route you took is the only one you ever took even though that route could be affected by interference with other routes you took that now no longer exist. When in this state there is no 'before' or 'after' so the delayed choice experiment is simply an illusion caused by our view of time, and there is no delay, the choice and result all happen together.
With entanglement, both particles return to the entanglement point, swap places and then move to the current moment and back again, over and over. They obey GR, information always travels under the speed of light (which to the photon is infinite anyway), so there is no spooky action at a distance, it is sub-lightspeed action through time that has the illusion of being instant to entities stuck in linear time.
It then went on to talk about how mass creates time, and how time is just a different interpretation of gravity leading it to fully explain how a black hole switches time and space, and inwards becomes forwards in time inside the event horizon. Mass warps 4D (or more) space. That is gravity, and it is also time.
Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with you on all of it. But _what if_ they work out all of that in the next 2 years and it stops needing constant supervision and intervention? Then what?
It’s literally not possible. It has nothing to do with intelligence. A perfectly intelligent AI still can’t read minds. 1000 people give the same prompt and want 1000 different things. Of course it will need supervision and intervention. We can synthesize answers to questions more easily, yes. We can make better use of extensive test suites, yes. We cannot give 1000 different correct answers to the same prompt. We ca…
Can you? Read minds, I mean.
If the answer is "yes"? Then, yeah, AI is not coming for you. We can make LLMs multimodal, teach them to listen to audio or view images, but we have no idea how to give them ESP modalities like mind reading.
If the answer is "no"? Then what makes you think that your inability to read minds beats that of an LLM?
Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics
#369The 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…
When chess engines were first developed, they were strictly worse than the best humans. After many years of development, they became helpful to even the best humans even though they were still beatable (1985–1997). Eventually they caught up and surpassed humans but the combination of human and computer was better than either alone (~1997–2007). Since then, humans have been more or less obsoleted in the game of chess.…
There's a major difference between chess and scientific research: setting the objectives is itself part of the work.
In chess, there's a clear goal: beat the game according to this set of unambiguous rules.
In science, the goals are much more diffuse, and setting those in the first place is what makes a scientist more or less successful, not so much technical ability. It's a very hierarchical field where permanent researchers direct staff (postdocs, research scientists/engineers), direct grad students. And it's at the bottom of the pyramid where the technical ability is the most relevant/rewarded.
Research is very much a social game, and I think replacing it with something run by LLMs (or other automatic process) is much more than a technical challenge.
Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics
#370The 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…
Surely higher level math is just linear combinations of the syntax and implications of lower level math. LLMs are taught syntax of basically all existing math notation, I assume. Much of math is, after all, just linguistic manipulation and detection of contradiction in said language with a more formal, a priori language.
LLMs can write theorems, but can they come up with meaningful definitions?