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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

#391

Post by newswasboring »

krackers wrote: post #308
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…

Because most times results like this are overstated (see the Cursor browser thing, "moltbook", etc.). There is clear market incentive to overhype things. And in this case "derives a new result in theoretical physics" is again overstating things, it's closer to "simplify and propose a more general form for a previously worked out sequence of amplitudes" which sounds less magical, and closer to something like what Math…

> it's closer to "simplify and propose a more general form for a previously worked out sequence of amplitudes"

How is this different than a new result? Many a careers in academia are built on simplifying mathematics.

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

#392

Post by srcreigh »

ACCount37 wrote: post #368
srcreigh wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is kind of the root of the issue. Humans are mystical beings with invisible sensibilities. Many of our thoughts come from a spiritual plane, not from our own brains, and we are all connected in ways most of us don't fully understand. In short, yes I can read minds, and so can everybody else.

Today's LLMs are fundamentally the same as any other machine we've built and there is no reason to think it has mystical sensibilities.

We really need to start making a differentiation between "intelligence" and "relevance". The AI can be perfectly intelligent, but without input from humans, it has no connection to our Zeitgeist, no source material. Smart people can be stupid, too, which means they are intelligent but disconnected from society. They make smart but irrelevant decisions just like AI models always will.

AI is like an artificial brain, and a good one, but humans have more to our intelligence than brains. AI is just a brain and we are more.

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

#393

Post by empath75 »

zarzavat wrote: post #340
empath75 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are already at stage 3 for software development and arguably step 4

We are at level 2.5 for software development, IMO. There is a clear skill gap between experienced humans and LLMs when it comes to writing maintainable, robust, concise and performant code and balancing those concerns. The LLMs are very fast but the code they generate is low quality. Their comprehension of the code is usually good but sometimes they have a weightfart and miss some obvious detail and need to be put on…

> The LLMs are very fast but the code they generate is low quality.

I think the latest generation of LLM with claude code is not low quality. It's better than the code that pretty much every dev on our team can do outside of very narrow edge cases.

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

#394

Post by qnleigh »

I'm surprised to see that the valence of comments here is mostly negative. Nima Arkhami-Hamed is one of the top living physicists, and he has nice things to say about the work. The fact that researchers can increasingly use these models to (help) find new results is a big deal, even considering the caveats.

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

#395

Post by mirsadm »

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…

My issue with any of these claims is the lack of proof. Just share the chat and now it got to the discovery. I'll believe it when I can see it for myself at this point. It's too easy to make all sorts of claims without proof these days. Elon Musk makes them all the time.

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

#396

Post by radioactivist »

turzmo wrote: post #275

Physicist here. Did you guys actually read the paper? Am I missing something? The "key" AI-conjectured formula (39) is an obvious generalization of (35)-(38), and something a human would have guessed immediately. (35)-(38) are the AI-simplified versions of (29)-(32). Those earlier formulae look formidable to simplify by hand, but they are also the sort of thing you'd try to use a computer algebra system for. I'm will…

Also a physicist here -- I had the same reaction. Going from (35-38) to (39) doesn't look like much of a leap for a human. They say (35-38) was obtained from the full result by the LLM, but if the authors derived the full expression in (29-32) themselves presumably they could do the special case too? (given it's much simpler). The more I read the post and preprint the less clear it is which parts the LLM did.

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

#397

Post by refulgentis »

turzmo wrote: post #366
refulgentis wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

No, because you can’t use mathematica to do this. You have been walking down a slippery slope for a couple years now, your choice when to exit. Sucks I gotta eat downvotes for it, but so it goes.

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

#398

Post by jonahx »

krethh wrote: post #338
jonahx wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "AI replaces humans in X" narrative is primarily a tool for driving attention and funding. It's also a legitimate concern. We happen to be in a place where humans are needed for that "last critical 10%," or the first critical 10% of problem formulation, and so humans are still crucial to the overall system, at least for most complex tasks. But there's no logical reason that needs to be the case. Once it's not,…

The logical reason is that humans are exceptionally good at operating at the edge of what the technology of the time can do. We will find entire classes of tech problems which AI can't solve on its own. You have people today with job descriptions that even 15 years ago would have been unimaginable, much less predictable. To think that whatever the AI is capable of solving is (and forever will be) the frontier of all…

> To think that whatever the AI is capable of solving is (and forever will be) the frontier of all problems is deeply delusional. AI got good at generating code, but it still can't even do a fraction of what the human brain can do.

AGI means fully general, meaning everything the human brain can do and more. I agree that currently it still feels far (at least it may be far), but there is no reason to think there's some magic human ingredient that will keep us perpetually in the loop. I would say that is delusional.

We used to think there was human-specific magic in chess, in poker, in Go, in code, and in writing. All those have fallen, the latter two albeit only in part but even that part was once thought to be the exclusive domain of humans.

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

#399

Post by refulgentis »

jrflowers wrote: post #293
refulgentis wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel for you because you kinda got baited into this by the language in the first couple comments. But whatever’s going on in your comment is so emotional that it’s hard to tell what you’re asking for that you haven’t been able to read already, tl;dr proof stuck at n=4 for years is now for arbitrary n

Yeah I kind of fell for it. I was hoping to be pleasantly surprised by a particle physicist in the openai victory lap thread or someone with insight into what “GPT 5.2 originally conjectured this” means exactly because the way it’s phrased in the preprint makes it sound like they were all doing bongrips with chatgpt and it went “man do you guys ever think about gluon tree amplitudes?” but uh, my empty post getting do…

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

#400

Post by lupsasca »

nilkn wrote: post #390
uh_uh wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you be similarly pedantic if a high-schooler did the same?

Yes. Someone making one contribution among many to a paper clearly does not deserve anything like sole authorship credit of the entire paper, which is what the title from OpenAI implies to me. I don't believe I'm being pedantic at all. And, by the way, high schoolers or college students make co-author-level contributions to real papers quite frequently in the US at least (I was one of them). The text of the post is m…

Hi, I'm an author on the paper. It was definitely a human-AI collaboration, but it is also true that the final simplified formula, Eq. 39 in the paper (which is what we had been seeking, without success), was conjectured and proved by GPT. So it derived a new result in theoretical physics. I'm genuinely puzzled by your complaint.
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