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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

#241

Post by DennisP »

silon42 wrote: post #61
lazide wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having tried to use various tools - in those specific examples - I found them either pointless or actively harmful. Writing emails - once I knew what I wanted to convey, the rest was so trivial as to not matter, and any LLM tooling just got in the way of actually expressing it as I ended up trying to tweak the junk it was producing. Meeting minutes - I have yet to see one that didn’t miss something important while cr…

> Writing emails - once I knew what I wanted to convey, the rest was so trivial as to not matter, and any LLM tooling just got in the way of actually expressing it as I ended up trying to tweak the junk it was producing. +1 LLM will help you produce the "filler" nobody wants the read anyway.

That's ok, the recipient can use an LLM to summarize it.

In the end, we'll all read and write tight little bullet points, with the LLM text on the wire functioning as the world's least efficient communication protocol.

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

#242

Post by famouswaffles »

sanderjd wrote: post #211
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I basically agree, but want to point out two major differences to other "hype-y" topics that existed in the past that in my opinion make the whole AI discussions on HN a little bit more controversial than other older hype discussions: 1. The whole investment volume (and thus hope and expectations) into AI is much larger than into other hype topics. 2. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was president of YCombinator, the c…

On (1): Investment volume relative to what? To me, it looks like a very similar pattern of investors crowding into the currently hot thing, trying to get a piece of the winners of the power law. On (2): I'm honestly not sure I think this is making a big difference at all. Not much of the commentary here is driven by YC stuff, because most of the audience here has no direct entwinement with YC.

>On (1): Investment volume relative to what? To me, it looks like a very similar pattern of investors crowding into the currently hot thing, trying to get a piece of the winners of the power law.

The profile of investors (nearly all the biggest tech companies amongst others) as well as how much they're willing to and have put down (billions) is larger than most.

Open AI alone just started work on a $100B+ datacenter (Stargate)

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

#243

Post by edanm »

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.

> 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.

In what world is this obviously not materializing? Plenty of people use GenAI for coding, with some claiming we're approaching the level of GenAI being able to automate vast portions of a developer's job.

Do you think this is wrong and the people saying this (some of them very experienced developers) are simply mistaken or lying?

Or do you think it's not a big deal?

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

#244

Post by nodar86 »

Flamentono2 wrote: post #139
uludag wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Every activity that is making people rich is by definiton moving money from Person A to Person B.

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

#245

Post by amelius »

angry_moose wrote: post #227

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 reasonab…

Could you use these models as a preconditioner in an iterative solver?

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

#246

Post by literalAardvark »

gthompson512 wrote: post #180
literalAardvark wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more relvant, AlphaEvolve is real. Could easily be brick 1 of self-improvement and the start of the banana zone.

> "the start of the banana zone" What does this mean? Is it some slang for exponential growth, or is it a reference to something like the "paperclip maximizer"?

It's slang for the J part of the exponential curve. Didn't expect that to be a problem here, sorry.

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

#247

Post by bgnn »

bgnn wrote: post #44
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.

Exactly this. What we expect from them is our speculation. In reality nobody knows the future and there's no way to know the future.

Wow I didn't expect this to be down voted. I guess there are people who knows the future.

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

#248

Post by sanderjd »

famouswaffles wrote: post #242
sanderjd wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On (1): Investment volume relative to what? To me, it looks like a very similar pattern of investors crowding into the currently hot thing, trying to get a piece of the winners of the power law. On (2): I'm honestly not sure I think this is making a big difference at all. Not much of the commentary here is driven by YC stuff, because most of the audience here has no direct entwinement with YC.

>On (1): Investment volume relative to what? To me, it looks like a very similar pattern of investors crowding into the currently hot thing, trying to get a piece of the winners of the power law. The profile of investors (nearly all the biggest tech companies amongst others) as well as how much they're willing to and have put down (billions) is larger than most. Open AI alone just started work on a $100B+ datacenter…

Yeah maybe I buy it. But it reminds me of the investment in building out the infrastructure of the internet. That predates HN, but it's the kind of thing we would have debated here if we could have :)

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

#249

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#250

Post by evilfred »

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…

most work in software jobs is not making one-off scripts like in your example. a lot of the job is about modifying existing codebases which include in-house approachs to style and services along with various third party frameworks like Spring driven by annotations, and requirements around how to write tests and how many. AI is just not very helpful here, you spend more time spinning wheels trying to craft the absolute perfect script than just making code changes directly.
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