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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

#141

Post by Flamentono2 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #122
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 env…

I do expect a researcher to verify the way the code interacts with the data set.

Still a lot of researchers can benefit from code tools for their daily work to make them a lot faster.

And plenty of strategies exist to saveguard this. Tool use for example, unit tests etc.

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

#142

Post by Flamentono2 »

ktallett wrote: post #67
Flamentono2 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutly not true I was not able to get meeting transcription in that quality that cheap ever before. I followed dictation software for over a decade and tx to ML the open source software is suddenly a lot better than ever before. Our internal company search with state of the art search indexes and search software was always shit. Now i ask an agent about a product standard and it just finds it. Image generation nev…

A lot of these issues you have had are simply user error or not using the right tool for the job.

I work for one very big software company.

If this was 'a simple user error' or 'not using the right tool for the job' than this was an error from smart people and it still got fixed by using AI/ML in an instant.

With this, my argument still stands even if it would be for a different reason which i personally doubt.

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

#143

Post by closewith »

ktallett wrote: post #103
StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is absolutely selling them as pa and already selling a lot. I think HNers being mostly software developers live in a bubble when it comes to the reality of what LLMs are actually used for. Speedy minutes are absolutely not a template away. Anyone who ever had to write minutes for a complicated meetings knows it’s hard and requires a lot of back and forth for everyone to agree about what was said and decided…

This is a business practice issue and staff issue, not a meeting minutes issue. I have meetings daily, and have never had this issue. You make it clear what is decided during the meeting, give anyone a chance to query or question, then no one can argue.

[flagged]

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

#144

Post by biophysboy »

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…

An example of an "AI" incremental improvement would be Oxford Nanopore sequencing. They extrude DNA through a nanopore, measure the current, and decode the bases using recurrent neural networks.

They exist all over science, but they are just one method among many, and they do not really drive hypotheses or interpretations (even now)

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

#145

Post by moffkalast »

Ygg2 wrote: post #111
moffkalast wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Last I checked, humans weren't guaranteed to do anything either.

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

#146

Post by whyowhy3484939 »

Flamentono2 wrote: post #140
whyowhy3484939 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 h…

> We finally have a system which encodes not just basic things but high level concepts

That's the thing I'm trying to convey: it's in fact not encoding anything you'll recognize and if it is, it's certainly not "concepts" as you understand them. Not saying it cannot correlate text that includes what you call "high level concepts" or do what you imagine to be useful work in that general direction. Again not making claims it's not useful, just saying that it becomes kind of meh once you factor in all costs and not just the hypothetical imaginary future productivity gains. AKA building literal nuclear reactors to do something that basically amounts to filling in React templates or whatever BS needs doing.

If it was reasoning it could start with a small set of bootstrap data and infer/deduce the rest from experience. It cannot. We are not even close as in there is not even theory to get us there forget about the engineering. It's not a subtle issue. We need to throw literally all data we have at it to get it to acceptable levels. At some point you have to retrace some steps and think over some decisions, but I guess I'm a skeptic.

In short it's a correlation engine which, again, is very useful and will go ways to improve our lives somewhat - I hope - but I'm not holding my breath for anything more. A lot of correlation does not causation make. No reasoning can take place until you establish ontology, causality and the whole shebang.

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

#147

Post by AngryData »

AstralStorm wrote: post #116
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Helicopters don't just fall out of the sky, atleast not any different than planes fall out of the sky, they can auto-rotate to the ground without engine power.

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

#148

Post by skydhash »

whyowhy3484939 wrote: post #129
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 navig…

Yeah. It’s just fancier techniques than linear regression. Just like the latter takes a set of numbers and produces another set, LLMs takes words and produces another set of words.

The actual techniques are the breakthrough. The result are fun to play with and may be useful in some occasions, but we don’t have to put them on a pedestal.

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

#149

Post by ktallett »

closewith wrote: post #143
ktallett wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a business practice issue and staff issue, not a meeting minutes issue. I have meetings daily, and have never had this issue. You make it clear what is decided during the meeting, give anyone a chance to query or question, then no one can argue.

[flagged]

You would be wrong. I am actually quite perky, I just don't suffer foolish admin tasks easily. I only have meetings with a goal (not just for the sake of it), and then I simply make sure it is clear what the solution is, no matter whose idea it was. I don't care about being right or wrong in a meeting, I care that we have a useful outcome and it isn't an hour wasted. Having a meeting whereby the outcome of a meeting is unclear is a complete waste of time, and is not solved by tech, it is solved by how your meetings are managed.

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

#150

Post by Retr0id »

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…

Google never gave a good reason for why they stopped making their cache public, but my theory is that it was because people were scraping it to train their LLMs.
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