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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

#221

Post by squidbeak »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #202
squidbeak wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think imagination may be the reason for this. Enthusiasts have kept that first wave of amazement at what AI is able to do, and find it easier to anticipate where this could lead. The pessimists on the other hand weren't impressed with its capabilities in the first place - or were, and then became disillusioned for something it couldn't do for them. It's naturally easier to look ahead from the optimistic standpoint.…

> It's naturally easier to look ahead from the optimistic standpoint. It is similarly easy to look ahead from a pessimist standpoint (e.g. how will this bubble collapse, and who will pay the bill for the hype?). The problem rather is that this overhyped optimistic standpoint is much more encouraged from society (and of course from the marketing). > There's also the other category who are terrified about the consequen…

No, I meant it's easier for optimists to look ahead at the possibilities inherent in the tech itself, which isn't true of pessimists, who - as you show - see instead the pattern of failed techs in it, whether that pattern matches AI or not.

If you can see the promise, you can see a gap to close between current capability and accomplished product. The question is then whether there's some barrier in that gap to make the accomplished product impossible forever. Pessimists tend to have given up on the tech already, so to them any talk about closing that gap is idle daydreaming or hype.

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

#222

Post by ccppurcell »

simianparrot wrote: post #28
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 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.

LLMs have blown crypto and nfts off the map, at least for normies like me. I wonder what will blow LLMs off the map?

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

#223

Post by pixl97 »

boxed wrote: post #163
montebicyclelo wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then go on to explain how they aren't useful in any field whatsoever > Where are the AI-driven breakthroughs > are we just using AI to remix existing general knowledge, while making no progress of any sort in any field using it? The obvious example of a highly significant AI-driven breakthrough is Alphafold [1]. It has already had a large impact on biotech, helping with drug discovery, computational biology, protei…

I'm personally waiting for the other shoe to drop here. I suspect that, since nature begins with an existing protein and modifies it slightly, AlphaFold is crazy overfitted to the training data. Furthermore, the enormous success of AlphaFold means that the number of people doing protein structure solving has likely crashed. So not only are we using an overfitting model that probably can't handle truly novel proteins,…

Why do you expect this, or is this just a "I need to find a reason to hate AI" thing?

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

#224

Post by mmarian »

ausbah wrote: post #209

> After a few weeks of failure, I messaged a friend at a different university, who told me that he too had tried using PINNs, but hadn’t been able to get good results. not really related to AI but this reflects a lesson I learned too late during some research in college: constant collaboration is important because it helps you avoid retreading over areas where others have already failed

Or the need for researchers to publish their failured experiments?

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

#225

Post by sailingparrot »

vrighter wrote: post #195
sailingparrot wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to anyone that understands the tech it can’t. This is a ridiculous take that makes me think you might not « understand the tech » as much as you think you do. Is AI useful today ? That depends on the exact use case but overall it seems pretty clear the hype is greater than the use currently. But sometimes I feel like everyone forgets that ChatGPT isn’t even 3 years old, 6 years ago we were stuck with GPT-2 whose mo…

If there is a single objective right answer, the model should output a probability of 1 for it, and 0 for everything else. Ex. If I ask "Is a sphere a curved object?" The one and only answer is "100% yes" not "I am 99% sure it is" (and once in a while actually say it isn't) This is pretty much impossible to achieve with current architectures (which aren't all that different to those of old, just bigger). If they did,…

> Anyone who understands the tech does know this

Yes, and this is does not mean the technology can never be useful.

I work everyday with that have false beliefs about a tech, I have a friend that until recently thought there were rivers on the moon, and some believe climate change is a hoax, I often forget things people told me and they have to tell me again.

Are humans not useful at anything ?

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

#226

Post by johnisgood »

Aldipower wrote: post #159
rickdeckard wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even that certain sub-industries prefer "AI", it's the umbrella term a company can use in Marketing for virtually any automated process that provides a seemingly subjective result. Case in point: For a decade the implementation of cameras went through development, testing and tuning of Auto Exposure, Auto Focus and Auto White-Balance ("AAA") engines as well as image post-processing. These engines ran on a Im…

I remember somethings similar when the term "cloud" came up. It is still someone else's server or datacenter with tooling.

Yeah, can they just stop coining terms to refer to old, pre-existing things? I still hate the term "cloud".

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

#227

Post by angry_moose »

I've been "lucky" enough to get to trial some AI FEM-like structural solvers.

At best, they're sortof ok for linear, small deformation problems. The kind of models where we could get an exact solution in ~5 minutes vs a fairly sloppy solution in ~30 seconds. Start throwing anything non-linear in and they just fall apart.

Maybe enough to do some very high-level concept selection but even that isn't great. I'm reasonably convinced some of them are just "curvature detectors" - make anything straight blue, anything with high curvature red, and interpolate everything else.

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

#228

Post by rafaelmn »

perlgeek wrote: post #203
rafaelmn wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is another dimension of the problem - what's even considered AI ? AlphaFold is a very specialized model - and I feel the AI boom is driven by hypothesis that general models eventually outperform specialized ones given enough size/data/whatever.

In my head, I just substitute "AI" with "machine learning" or "statistics". > and I feel the AI boom is driven by hypothesis that general models eventually outperform specialized ones given enough size/data/whatever. I think in the sciences, I'd generally put my money on the specialized models. I hope that the hype around AI makes it easier (by providing tooling, platforms, better algorithms, educational materials et…

I expect the opposite - hardware/compute going to be locked up in AGI quests unless the bubble pops and then it gets discounted

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

#229

Post by elcritch »

sebastiennight wrote: post #160
fluidcruft wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree it's completely meaningless. At this point I think marketing would label a toilet fill valve as "AI".

Well the "smart toilet" is definitely a thing you can buy today: > The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) in bathroom fixtures, particularly toilets, is shaping the future of hygiene, convenience, and sustainability.

While automated AI measurement of the chemical makeup of .. human effluent could be helpful for tracking health trends, I fear it’d also come with built in integrations for Instagram and TikTok.

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

#230

Post by idontwantthis »

johnisgood wrote: post #226
Aldipower wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember somethings similar when the term "cloud" came up. It is still someone else's server or datacenter with tooling.

Yeah, can they just stop coining terms to refer to old, pre-existing things? I still hate the term "cloud".

My favorite description is “The cloud is a computer you don’t own in Reston, VA”
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