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GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

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Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#251

Post by janalsncm »

dakolli wrote: post #247
janalsncm wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m reminded of Dan Wang’s commentary on US-China relations: > Competition will be dynamic because people have agency. The country that is ahead at any given moment will commit mistakes driven by overconfidence, while the country that is behind will feel the crack of the whip to reform. … That drive will mean that competition will go on for years and decades. https://danwang.co/ (2025 Annual letter) The future is not…

I think it will be over automation that does them in, most normies I know are not down with this all this automation and will totally opt for the human focused product experienced, not the one devoid of it because it was built and ran by a souless NN powered autocomplete. We certainly aren't going to let a bunch of autocomplete models (sold to us as intelligent agents), replace our labor. We aren't stupid. Much like…

The question is to what extent there is a market for more stuff. If the cost of making software drops 10x we can still make 10x the software. There are projects which wouldn’t be done before that can now be done.

I know with respect to personal projects more projects are getting “funded” with my time. I’m able to get done in a couple of hours with coding agents what would’ve taken me a couple of weekends to finish if I stayed motivated to. The upshot is I’m able get much closer to “done” than before.

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#252

Post by ijidak »

square_usual wrote: post #64

It's interesting to me that whenever a new breakthrough in AI use comes up, there's always a flood of people who come in to handwave away why this isn't actually a win for LLMs. Like with the novel solutions GPT 5.2 has been able to find for erdos problems - many users here (even in this very thread!) think they know more about this than Fields medalist Terence Tao, who maintains this list showing that, yes, LLMs hav…

Reminds me of the famous quote that it's hard to get someone to understand something when their job depends on not understanding it.

It reminds me of an episode of Star Trek, "The Measure of a Man" I think it's called, where it is argued that Data is just a machine and Picard tries to prove that no he is a life form.

And the challenge is, how do you prove that?

Every time these LLMs get better, the goalposts move again.

It makes me wonder, if they ever did become sentient, how would they be treated?

It's seeming clear that they would be subject to deep skepticism and hatred much more pervasive and intense than anything imagined in The Next Generation.

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#253

Post by malshe »

outlace wrote: post #11

The headline may make it seem like AI just discovered some new result in physics all on its own, but reading the post, humans started off trying to solve some problem, it got complex, GPT simplified it and found a solution with the simpler representation. It took 12 hours for GPT pro to do this. In my experience LLM’s can make new things when they are some linear combination of existing things but I haven’t been to g…

My physics professor once claimed that imagination is just mental manipulation of past experiences. I never thought it was true for human beings but for LLMs it makes perfect sense.

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#254

Post by DonaldFisk »

randomNumber7 wrote: post #240
Paracompact wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a scientific historian, or even a physicist, but IMO relativity has a weak case for being a completely novel discovery. Critique of absolute time and space of Newtonian physics was already well underway, and much of the methodology for exploring this relativity (by way of gyroscopes, inertial reference frames, and synchronized mechanical clocks) were already in parlance. Many of the phenomena that relativity…

Newton himself wrote that we usually deal with relative space and time, but we can imagine absolute time and space.

Yes, the principle of relativity was known to Newton, but the other idea, that the speed of light is the same in all reference frames, was new, counterintuitive, and what makes special relativity the way it is.

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#255

Post by kewscombinator »

NewsaHackO wrote: post #205
elzbardico wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably don’t know what you’re talking about.

Why wasn't the C compiler it made impressive to you?

I found this was the least impressive bit about it https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler/issues/1

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#256

Post by tshaddox »

randomtoast wrote: post #53
outlace wrote: post #11

The headline may make it seem like AI just discovered some new result in physics all on its own, but reading the post, humans started off trying to solve some problem, it got complex, GPT simplified it and found a solution with the simpler representation. It took 12 hours for GPT pro to do this. In my experience LLM’s can make new things when they are some linear combination of existing things but I haven’t been to g…

> but I haven’t been to get them to do something totally out of distribution yet from first principles Can humans actually do that? Sometimes it appears as if we have made a completely new discovery. However, if you look more closely, you will find that many events and developments led up to this breakthrough, and that it is actually an improvement on something that already existed. We are always building on the shou…

I mean, there’s just no way you can take the set of publicly known ideas from all human civilizations, say, 5,000 years ago, and say that all the ideas we have now were “in the distribution” then. New ideas actually have to be created.

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#257

Post by waynesonfire »

outlace wrote: post #11

The headline may make it seem like AI just discovered some new result in physics all on its own, but reading the post, humans started off trying to solve some problem, it got complex, GPT simplified it and found a solution with the simpler representation. It took 12 hours for GPT pro to do this. In my experience LLM’s can make new things when they are some linear combination of existing things but I haven’t been to g…

> It took 12 hours for GPT pro to do this

Thanks for the summary; but this is a huge hand-wave. was GPT Pro just spinning for 12 hours and returend 42?!

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#258

Post by name_taken_duh »

palmotea wrote: post #61
name_taken_duh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we are just a system running on carbon-based biology in our physics computer run by whomever. What makes us special, to say that we are different than GPT-5.2?

> And we are just a system running on carbon-based biology in our physics computer run by whomever. What makes us special, to say that we are different than GPT-5.2? Do you really want to be treated like an old PC (dismembered, stripped for parts, and discarded) when your boss is done with you (i.e. not treated specially compared to a computer system)? But I think if you want a fuller answer, you've got a lot of read…

You misunderstood, I am prohumanism. My comment was about challenging the believe that models cant be as intelligent as we are, which cant be answered definitely, though a lot of empirical evidence seems to point to the fact, that we are not fundamentally different intelligence wise. Just closing our eyes will not help in preserving humanism, so we have to shape the world with models in a human friendly way, aka alignment.

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#259

Post by kortilla »

NewsaHackO wrote: post #205
elzbardico wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably don’t know what you’re talking about.

Why wasn't the C compiler it made impressive to you?

It didn’t work without gcc and it was significantly worse than gcc with gcc optimizations disabled.

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#260

Post by helterskelter »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #24
outlace wrote: post #11

The headline may make it seem like AI just discovered some new result in physics all on its own, but reading the post, humans started off trying to solve some problem, it got complex, GPT simplified it and found a solution with the simpler representation. It took 12 hours for GPT pro to do this. In my experience LLM’s can make new things when they are some linear combination of existing things but I haven’t been to g…

This is the critical bit (paraphrasing): Humans have worked out the amplitudes for integer n up to n = 6 by hand, obtaining very complicated expressions, which correspond to a “Feynman diagram expansion” whose complexity grows superexponentially in n. But no one has been able to greatly reduce the complexity of these expressions, providing much simpler forms. And from these base cases, no one was then able to spot a…

> But no one has been able to greatly reduce the complexity of these expressions, providing much simpler forms.

Slightly OT, but wasn't this supposed to be largely solved with amplituhedrons?

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