Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected

understandingai.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 307 posts

Re: AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected

#111

Post by Ygg2 »

moffkalast wrote: post #69
Ygg2 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's less LLM and more three projects by DeepMind team. And it's far from commercial availability.

Well to me personally it at least proves something that's long been touted as impossible, that the current architecture can in fact do better than all humans at novel tasks, even if it needs a crutch at the moment. An LLM-based system now holds the SOTA approach on several math problems, how crazy is that? I wasn't convinced before, but now I guess it won't be many decades before we view making new scientific advance…

Yeah, but those rely on setting up the evolve function. And they aren't well guaranteed to be better than humans. They might find you an improvement, but aren't guaranteed to do as shown here[1] (green means better, red means worse, gray means same).

[1] https://youtu.be/sGCmu7YKgPA?t=480

Re: AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected

#112

Post by dwroberts »

swyx wrote: post #81
dwroberts wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it only seems to be labs and companies that also have a vested interest in selling it as a product that are able to achieve these breakthroughs. Which is a little suspect, right?

too tinfoil hat. google is perfectly happy to spend billions dogfooding their own TPUs and not give the leading edge to the public.

I’m not saying they’re phoney - just we need to take this stuff with a big pinch of salt.

The Microsoft paper around the quantum “ breakthrough ” is in a different field, but maybe a good example of why we need to be a little more cautious of research-as-marketing

Re: AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected

#114

Post by snodnipper »

Wilsoniumite wrote: post #77
plasticeagle wrote: post #25

Does anybody else find it peculiar that the majority of these articles about AI say things like "of course I don't doubt that AI will lead to major discoveries", and then go on to explain how they aren't useful in any field whatsoever? Where are the AI-driven breakthroughs? Or even the AI-driven incremental improvements? Do they exist anywhere? Or are we just using AI to remix existing general knowledge, while making…

Some new ish maths has been discovered. It's up to you if this is valid or impressive enough, but I think it's significant for things to come: https://youtu.be/sGCmu7YKgPA?si=EG9i0xGHhDu1Tb0O

Personally, I have been very pleased with the results despite the limitations.

Like many (I suspect), I have had several users provide comments that the AI processes I have defined have made meaningful impacts on their daily lives - often saving them double digit hours of effort per week. Progress.

Re: AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected

#115

Post by flir »

rkuodys wrote: post #53
ktallett wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hype surrounding them is not as a pa and tbh a lot of these use cases already have existing methods that work just fine. There are ways to find key information in files already, and speedy meeting minutes is really just a template away.

What I see LLMs at this point is simplified input and output solutions with reduced barriers of entry. So application could become more widespread. Now that I think of it, maybe this AI era is not electricity, but rather GUI - like the time when Jobs(or whoever) figured out and adopted modern GUI on computers allowing more widespread uses of computer

It's a good analogy because the key development does seem to have been the interface. Instead of wrapping it up as a text autocomplete (a la google search), openai wrapped it up as an IM client, and we were off to the races.

Re: AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected

#116

Post by AstralStorm »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #110
jstummbillig wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people are mostly bad at value judgements, and AI is no exception. What they naively wished the future was like: Flying cars. What they actually got (and is way more useful but a lot less flashy): Cheap solar energy.

> What they naively wished the future was like: Flying cars. This future is already there: We have flying cars: they are called "helicopters" (see also https://xkcd.com/1623/ ).

Oh they're not even close in availability as cars, much harder to operate, much more expensive and tend to fall out of the sky.

Thank you for providing an example that directly maps to usefulness of ANN in most research though.

Re: AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected

#117

Post by phpnode »

plasticeagle wrote: post #25

Does anybody else find it peculiar that the majority of these articles about AI say things like "of course I don't doubt that AI will lead to major discoveries", and then go on to explain how they aren't useful in any field whatsoever? Where are the AI-driven breakthroughs? Or even the AI-driven incremental improvements? Do they exist anywhere? Or are we just using AI to remix existing general knowledge, while making…

it's the new "I love my tesla but here are 15 reasons why it's broken" - if you don't provide platitudes the mob provides pitchforks

Re: AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected

#118

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

ktallett wrote: post #101
StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, LLMs are the right tool for the job. They just work. I mean if you are going to deny their usefulness in the face of plenty of people telling you they actually help, it’s going to be impossible to have a discussion.

They can be useful, however for admin tasks, there are plenty of valid alternatives that really take no longer time wise so why bother using all that computing power. They don't just work though, they are not fool proof and definitely require double checking.

> valid alternatives that really take no longer time wise

That’s not my experience.

We use them more and more at my job. It was already great for most office tasks including brainstorming simple things but now suppliers are starting to sell us agents which pretty much just work and honestly there are a ton of things for which LLMs seem really suited for.

CMDB queries? Annoying SAP requests for which you have to delve through dozens of menus? The stupid interface of my travel management and expense software? Please give me a chatbot for all of that which can actually decipher what I’m trying to do. These are hours of productivity unlocked.

We are also starting to deploy more and more RAG on select core business dataset and it’s more useful than even I anticipated and I’m already convinced. You ask, you get a brief answer and the documents back. This used to be either hours of delving through search results or emails with experts.

As imperfect as they are now, the potential value of LLMs is already tremendous.

Re: AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected

#119

Post by batty_alex »

apwell23 wrote: post #104
StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t remember when NFTs and cryptos helped me draft an email, wrote my meetings minutes for me or allowed me to easily search information previously locked in various documents. I think there is this weird take amongst some on HN where LLMs are either completely revolutionary and making break through or utterly useless. The truth is that they are useful already as a productivity tool.

> wrote my meetings minutes why is this such a posterchild for llms. everyone always leads with this. how boring are these meetings and do ppl actually review these notes? i never ever saw anyone reading meeting minutes or even mention them. Why is this usecase even mentioned in LLM ads.

I think the same thing every time. I've never had anyone read my meeting notes and they're better off in some sort of work order system anyways.

All I'm hearing is an appeal to making the workplace more isolating. Don't talk to each other, just talk to the machine that might summarize it wrong

Re: AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected

#120

Post by Xmd5a »

cornholio wrote: post #76
StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t remember when NFTs and cryptos helped me draft an email, wrote my meetings minutes for me or allowed me to easily search information previously locked in various documents. I think there is this weird take amongst some on HN where LLMs are either completely revolutionary and making break through or utterly useless. The truth is that they are useful already as a productivity tool.

For now, the reasoning abilities of the best and largest models are somewhat on par with those of a human crackpot with an internet connection, that misunderstands some wild fact or theory and starts to speculate dumb and ridiculous "discoveries". So the real world application to scientific thought is low, because science does not lack imbeciles. But of course, models always improve and they never grow tired (if enou…

I see myself in these words:

>that misunderstands some wild fact or theory and starts to speculate dumb and ridiculous "discoveries"

>even an idiot can stumble upon low hanging fruits overlooked by the brightest minds.

Post reply on HN