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

understandingai.org

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

#131

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…

There is rarely a constructive discussion around the term “AI”. You can’t say anything useful about what it might lead to or how useful it might be, because it is purely a marketing term that does not have a specific meaning (neither do both of the words in its abbreviation). Interesting discussions tend to avoid “AI” in favour of specific terms such as “ML”, “LLM”, “GAN”, “stable diffusion”, “chatbot”, “image genera…

I think AI is a useful term which usually means a neural network architecture but without specifying the exact architecture.

I think Machine Learning doesn't mean this as a word, as it can also refer to linear regression, non-linear optimisation, decision trees, bayesian networks etc.

That's not saying that AI isn't abused as a term - but I do think a more general term to describe the latest 5 years advancements in neural networks to solve problems is useful. Particularly as it's not obvious which model architectures would apply to which fields without more work (or even if novel architectures will be required for frontier science applications).

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

#132
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many tasks in the world that 1. Involve a computer 2. Do not require incredible intelligence 3. Involve the messiness of the real world enough that you can't write exact code to do it without it being insanely fragile LLMs suddenly start to tackle these, and tackle them kind of all at once. Additionally they are "programmed" in just English and so you don't need a specialist to do something like change t…

Do you really believe the outlay in terms of computer power is worth it to change the tone of an email? If it never gets better, this is a vast waste of an enormous amount of resources.

That's not what I've talked about them being for, but regardless it depends on the impact surely. If it can show you how someone may misunderstand your point and either help correct it or just show the problem then yes that can easily be worth spending a few cycles on. The additional energy cost of further back and forths caused by a misunderstanding could very easily be higher. At full whack, my GPU draws something like 10x what my monitor does, so fixing something quickly and automatically can easily use less power than doing it automatically.

Again though, that's not at all what I've talked about.

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

#133
post #20
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with that. Classically used "AI benchmarks" need to be questioned. In my field, these guys have dropped a bomb, and no one seem to care: https://hal.science/hal-04715638/document

Can you give brief summary why this paper is a breakthrough for an outsider of the field?

I don't think it qualifies as a breakthrough. In short:

1. Segmentation is a very classical in medical image processing. 2. Everyday there are papers claiming that they beat the state of the art 3. This paper says that most of the time, the state of the art has not been beat because they actually are in the margin of error.

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

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This does not apply to PINNs though. They were used and investigated by people deeply knowledgeable about numerics and neural networks, they just totally failed to live up to expectation.

"they just totally failed to live up to expectation" Because the expectation was too high. If you are aiming for precision, neural networks might not be the best solution for you. That is why generative AI works so well, it doesn’t need to be extremely precise. On the other hand you don't see people use neural networks in system control for cricital processes.

Apart from self driving and autonomous flying...

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

#135

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…

> Where are the AI-driven breakthroughs?

Define breakthrough. When is the improvement big enough to count as one?

Define AI. Are you talking about modern LLM, or is old school ML also in that question?

I mean Googles AI-company had with AlphaFold and other project quite the impact.

> Or are we just using AI to remix existing general knowledge

Is remixing bad? Isn't many science today "just" remixing with slight improvements? I mean, there is a reason why we have theoretical and practical scientists. Doing boring Lab-work and accidentally discovering something exciting is not the only way science is happening. Analysing data and remixing information, building new theories, is also important.

And don't forget, we don't have AGI yet. Whatever AI is doing today, is limited by what humans are using it for. Another question is, whether LLM is not normalized enough already that we do not see it as very special any more, if it's used somewhere. So we might not even see it if AI has significant impact on any breakthrough.

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

#136

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 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.

I'd be interested in reading some more from the people you're referring to when talking about experts who understand the field. At least to the extent I've followed the discussion, even the top experts are all over the place when it comes to the future of AI.

As a counterpoint: Geoffrey Hinton. You could say he's gone off the deep end on a tangent, but I definitely don't his incentive is to make money off of hype. Then there's Yann LeCun saying AI "could actually save humanity from extinction". [0]

If these guys just out of touch talking heads, who are the new guard people should read up on?

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/27/godfather...

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

#137
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"they just totally failed to live up to expectation" Because the expectation was too high. If you are aiming for precision, neural networks might not be the best solution for you. That is why generative AI works so well, it doesn’t need to be extremely precise. On the other hand you don't see people use neural networks in system control for cricital processes.

Apart from self driving and autonomous flying...

AI is used in scene understanding for those applications, but there is no neural network that is steering the wheel.

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

#138

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…

There is rarely a constructive discussion around the term “AI”. You can’t say anything useful about what it might lead to or how useful it might be, because it is purely a marketing term that does not have a specific meaning (neither do both of the words in its abbreviation). Interesting discussions tend to avoid “AI” in favour of specific terms such as “ML”, “LLM”, “GAN”, “stable diffusion”, “chatbot”, “image genera…

Also, the strong predictions about AI are using a vague term because the tech often doesn't exist yet. There isn't a chatbot right now that I feel confident can out-perform me at systems design but I'm pretty certain something that can is coming. Odds are also good that in 2-4 years there will be new hotness to replace LLMs that are much more functional (maybe MLLMs, maybe called something else). We can start to predict and respond to their potential even though they don't exist yet; it just takes a little extrapolating. But it doesn't have a name yet.

Which is to agree - obviously if people are talking about "AI" they don't want to talk about something that exists right this second. If they did it'd be better to use a precise word.

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

#139
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm sure there's many people out there who could say that they hardly use AI but that crypto has made them lots of money. At the end of the day searching work documents and talking with computers is only desirable inasmuch as they are economically profitable. Crypto at the end of the day is responsible for a lot of people getting wealthy. Was a lot of this wealth obtained on sketchy grounds? probably, but the same co…

Crypto is not making people rich, it is about moving money from Person A to Person B.

And sure everyone who got the money from others by gambling are biased. Fine with me.

But in comparision to crypto, people around me actually use AI/ML (most of them).

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

#140

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 navig…

I'm following LLMs, AI/ML for a few years now and not just on a high level.

There is not a single system out there today which can do what claude can do.

I stil see it for what it is: A technology i can communicate/use with natural language and get a very diverse of tasks done. From writing/generating code, to svgs, to emails, translation etc. etc. etc.

Its a paradigma shift for the whole world literaly.

We finally have a system which encodes not just basic things but high level concepts. And we humans are doing often enough something very similiar.

And what limitations are obvious? Tell me? We have not reached any real ceiling yet. We are limited by GPU capacity or how many architectural experiments a researcher can run. We have plenty of work to do to cleanup the data set we use and have. We need to build more infrastructure, better software support etc.

We have not even reached the phase were we all have local AI/ML chips build in.

We don't even know yet how a system will act if everyone of us has access to very fast inferencing like you already get with groq.

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