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

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

#121

Post by dgb23 »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #16
BenFranklin100 wrote: post #4

The author is a Princeton PhD grad working in physics. Funding for this type of work usually comes from the NSF. NSF is under attack by DOGE, and Trump has proposed slashing the NSF budget by 55%. A reason used to justify these massive cuts is that AI will soon replace traditional research. This post demonstrates this assumption is likely false.

Kinda off-topic, but about the cutting itself: I used to work in academia and was involved in NSF-funded programs, so I have mixed feelings about this. Waste and inefficiency are rampant. BTW I'm not talking about failed projects or research that were dimmed "not important", but things like buying million-dollar equipment just to use up the budget, which then sits idle. That said, slashing NSF funding by 50% won’t fi…

Even considering these inefficiencies, which are certainly to be taken seriously, there aren't a lot of things that have such a high ROI as research and education.

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

#122

Post by Barrin92 »

Flamentono2 wrote: post #64

I'm not sure why people on HN (of all places) are so divided regarding the perception of AI/ML. I have not seen anything like it before. We literaly had not system or way of even doing things like code generation based on text input. Just last week i asked for a script to do image segmentation with a basic UI and claude just generated that for me in under 1 Minute. I could list tons of examples which are groundbreaki…

>but alone for every researcher who needs to write code for their research, AI can make them already a lot more efficient.

scientists don't need to be efficient, they need to be correct. Software bugs were already a huge cause of scientific error, and responsible for lack of reproducibility, see for example cases like this (https://www.vice.com/en/article/a-code-glitch-may-have-cause...)

Programming in research environments is done with some notoriously questionably variation in quality, as is the case for the industry to be fair, but in research minor errors can ruin results of entire studies. People are fed up and come to much harsher judgements on AI because in an environment like a lab you cannot write software with the attitude of an impressionist painter or the AI equivalent, you need to actually know what you're typing.

AI can make you more efficient if you don't care if you're right, which is maybe cool if you're generating images for your summer beach volleyball event, but it's a disastrous idea if you're writing code in a scientific environment.

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

#123

Post by ktallett »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #118
ktallett wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How do you check accuracy of these? You stated brainstorming as an example that they are great at. As obviously experts are experts for a reason.

My issue here is that a lot of this is solved by good practice, for example,travel management and expenses have been solved, company credit card. I don't need one slightly better piece of software to manage one terrible piece of software to solve an issue that has a solution.

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

#124

Post by Upvoter33 »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #16
BenFranklin100 wrote: post #4

The author is a Princeton PhD grad working in physics. Funding for this type of work usually comes from the NSF. NSF is under attack by DOGE, and Trump has proposed slashing the NSF budget by 55%. A reason used to justify these massive cuts is that AI will soon replace traditional research. This post demonstrates this assumption is likely false.

Kinda off-topic, but about the cutting itself: I used to work in academia and was involved in NSF-funded programs, so I have mixed feelings about this. Waste and inefficiency are rampant. BTW I'm not talking about failed projects or research that were dimmed "not important", but things like buying million-dollar equipment just to use up the budget, which then sits idle. That said, slashing NSF funding by 50% won’t fi…

Yeah companies never waste money.

I’m tired of all the complaining about waste and overhead in academics. Companies waste money all the time…

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

#125

Post by SiempreViernes »

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.

Indeed, it seems doubtful that an org having so structurless meetings that they are struggling to write minutes is capable of having meetings for which minutes serves any purpose beyond covering ass.

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

#126

Post by nerdponx »

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…

New numerical computing algorithms are being developed with AI assistance, which probably would not have been discovered otherwise. There was an article here a few days ago about one of those. It's incremental but it's not nothing.

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

#127

Post by sgt101 »

tonii141 wrote: post #42

This article addresses the misconception that arises when someone lacks a clear understanding of the underlying mathematics of neural networks and mistakenly believes they are a magical solution capable of solving every problem. While neural networks are powerful tools, using them effectively requires knowledge and experience to determine when they are appropriate and when alternative approaches are better suited.

I think that while the mathematics of neural networks are clearly completely understood we do not really understand why neural networks behave the way that they do when combined with large amounts of real world data.

In particular the ability of auto regressive transformer based networks to produce sequences speech while being immutable still shocks me whenever I think about it. Of course, this says as much about what we think of ourselves and other humans as it does about the matrices. I also think that the weather forcasting networks are quite shocking, the compression that they have achieved in modeling the physical system that produces weather is frankly.... wrong... but it obviously does actually work.

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

#128

Post by NotCamelCase »

Sharlin wrote: post #98
eschaton wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they didn’t say that the rah-rah-AI crowd would come for them with torches and pitchforks. It’s a ward against that, nothing more.

Similar to the way many Trump supporters, when daring to criticize him, feel the need to assert that they still love him and would vote for him again. (See, eg. r/LeopardsAteMyFace for examples. It’s fascinating.)

Or any time one dares to criticize Israel for their recent contributions to peace on Earth (wink wink) -- it has to be prefaced with "Let me say that I'm the biggest defender of the Jews and fight against anti-Semitism".

It's moot.

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

#129

Post by whyowhy3484939 »

Flamentono2 wrote: post #64

I'm not sure why people on HN (of all places) are so divided regarding the perception of AI/ML. I have not seen anything like it before. We literaly had not system or way of even doing things like code generation based on text input. Just last week i asked for a script to do image segmentation with a basic UI and claude just generated that for me in under 1 Minute. I could list tons of examples which are groundbreaki…

> Just last week i asked for a script to do image segmentation with a basic UI and claude just generated that for me in under 1 Minute.

Thing is we just see that it's copy pasting stack overflow, but now in a fancy way so this is sounding like "I asked Google for a nearby restaurant and it found it in like 500ms, my C64 couldn't do that". It sounds impressive (and it is) because it sounds like "it learned about navigating in the real world and it can now solve everything related to that" but what it actually solved is "fancy lookup in a GIS database". It's useful, damn sure it is, but once the novelty wears off you start seeing it for what it is instead of what you imagine it is.

Edit: to drive the point home.

> claude just generated that

What you think happened is AI is "thinking" and building a ontology over which it reasoned and came to the logical conclusion that this script was the right output. What actually happened is your input correlates to this output according to the trillion examples it saw. There is no ontology. There is no reasoning. There is nothing. Of course this is still impressive and useful as hell, but the novelty will wear off in time. The limitations are obvious by this point.

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

#130

Post by vanattab »

Flamentono2 wrote: post #58
simianparrot wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s why it keeps looking exactly like NFT’s and crypto hype cycles to me: Yes the technology has legitimate uses, but the promises of groundbreaking use cases that will change the world are obviously not materialising and to anyone that understands the tech it can’t. It’s people making money off hype until it dies and move on to the next scam-with-some-use.

We already have breakthroughs. Benchmark results which have been unheard of before ML. Alone language translation got so much better, voice syntesis, voice transcription. All my meetings now are searchable and i can ask 'ai' to summarize my meetings in a relative accurate way impossible before that. Alphafold made a breakthrough in protein folding. Image and Video generation can now do unbelievable things. Realtime v…

Which ai program do you use for live video meeting translation?
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