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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

#281

Post by apwell23 »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #277
apwell23 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wrote my meetings minutes why is this such a posterchild for llms. everyone always leads with this. how boring are these meetings and do ppl actually review these notes? i never ever saw anyone reading meeting minutes or even mention them. Why is this usecase even mentioned in LLM ads.

Because meeting minutes are hard, annoying to do and LLMs are good at it. To be blunt, I think most HNers are young software developers, never attend any meetings of significance and don’t have to deal with many différent topics so they fail to see the usefulness because they are not in a position to understand it. The tails are everywhere like people mentioning work orders which is something extremely operational. I…

ok i'll take your word for it that people read meeting notes.

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

#282

Post by sebastiennight »

elcritch wrote: post #229
sebastiennight wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good news! The integration will be used to customize your feed by recommending foods and medicine that you might enjoy.

The future is allowing advertisers to bid on specific proteins and triglyceride chains detected by the smart toilet.

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

#284

Post by frickinLasers »

ethbr1 wrote: post #269
const_cast wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the problems of careerism is really a side-effect of academia becoming more enthralled with the private sector, and therefore inheriting it's problems. If there's one thing working as a software dev has taught me, it's that all decisions are made from a careerist, selfish perspective. Nobody cares what's best, they care what's most impressive and what will personally get them ahead. After it's done, it's…

The follow on from this is that any structure one wants to persist through time had better rest maximally on people acting in their own self interest.

This doesn't seem possible, because self interest will always lead to hacking the structure for better returns, and technology accelerates the ability to do that. It seems to me that whatever is put in place to direct selfish behavior toward good will eventually be rerouted or broken for one exceptionally selfish asshole or group.

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

#285

Post by angry_moose »

amelius wrote: post #245
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?

I don't see any reason its not theoretically possible but I doubt it would be that beneficial.

You'd have to map the results back onto the traditional model which has overhead; and using shaky results as a precondition is going to negate a lot of the benefits, especially if its (incorrectly) predicting the part is already in the non-linear stress range which I've seen before. Force balances are all over the place as well (if they even bother to predict them at all, which its not always clear) so it could even be starting from a very unstable point.

Its relatively trivial to just use the native solution from a linear solution as the starting point instead, which is basically what is done anyway with auto time stepping.

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

#286

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

apwell23 wrote: post #281
StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because meeting minutes are hard, annoying to do and LLMs are good at it. To be blunt, I think most HNers are young software developers, never attend any meetings of significance and don’t have to deal with many différent topics so they fail to see the usefulness because they are not in a position to understand it. The tails are everywhere like people mentioning work orders which is something extremely operational. I…

ok i'll take your word for it that people read meeting notes.

Meeting notes are not only there to be read. Their usefulness is that they are a trace of what was said and decided that everyone in the meeting agreed upon which is extremely important as soon as things get political.

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

#287

Post by hnaccount_rng »

th0ma5 wrote: post #216
Flamentono2 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do understand it but i also think that the current LLMs are the first step to it. GPT-3 started proper investment into this topic, there was not enough research done in this direction and now it is. People like Yann LeCun already analyse different approaches/architecture but they still use the infrastructure of LLMs (ML/GPUs) and potentially the data. I never said that LLM is the breaktrhough in consesnes. But you…

I mean, you're not even wrong ! Most all of these large models are based on the idea that if you put all of the representations that we can of the world into a big pile that you can tease out some kind of meaning. There's not even really a cohesive theory as to that, and surely no testable way to prove that it's true. It certainly seems like you can make a system that behaves as if it could be like that, and I think…

There is an interesting analogy that my Analysis I professor once said: The intersection of all valid examples are also a definition of an object. In many ways this is, at least in my current understanding, how ML systems "think". So yeah it will take some superposition of examples and kind of try to interpolate between those. But fundamentally it is - at least so far - always an interpolation, not an extrapolation.

Whether we consider that "just regurgitating Stackoverflow" or "it thought up the solution to my problem" mostly comes up to semantics

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

#288

Post by ethbr1 »

frickinLasers wrote: post #284
ethbr1 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The follow on from this is that any structure one wants to persist through time had better rest maximally on people acting in their own self interest.

This doesn't seem possible, because self interest will always lead to hacking the structure for better returns, and technology accelerates the ability to do that. It seems to me that whatever is put in place to direct selfish behavior toward good will eventually be rerouted or broken for one exceptionally selfish asshole or group.

It's not a binary classification.

Some structures are more resistant, some less.

Some are self-correcting, some not.

The biggest design feature is usually requiring energy to be burnt to hack the desired outcome. At some point it's more effort than benefit.

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

#289

Post by loa_in_ »

shusaku wrote: post #85
geremiiah wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to generalize because I do not know how widespread this pattern is, but my job has me hopping between a few HPC centers around Germany, and a pattern I notice is that, a lot of these places are chuck full of reject physicists, and a lot of the AI funding that gets distributed gets gobbled up by these people and the consequence of which is a lot of these ML4Science projects. I personally think it is a bit…

> a pattern I notice is that, a lot of these places are chuck full of reject physicists Utter nonsense, these are some of the smartest people in the world who do incredibly valuable science.

Exactly. Passing academia is the opposite of being a reject.

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

#290

Post by apwell23 »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #286
apwell23 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ok i'll take your word for it that people read meeting notes.

Meeting notes are not only there to be read. Their usefulness is that they are a trace of what was said and decided that everyone in the meeting agreed upon which is extremely important as soon as things get political.

sounds like you work at a fun place :) . watch your every word you utter incase it gets used against you.
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