GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by nprateem » Sat, Feb 14, 2026, 5:19 AM UTC

Toutouxc wrote: post #217

lovecg wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s have some compassion, a lot of people are freaking out about their careers now and defense mechanisms are kicking in. It’s hard for a lot of people to say “actually yeah this thing can do most of my work now, and barrier of entry dropped to the ground”.

I am constantly seeing this thing do most of my work (which is good actually, I don't enjoy typing code), but requiring my constant supervision and frequent intervention and always trying to sneak in subtle bugs or weird architectural decisions that, I feel with every bone in my body, would bite me in the ass later. I see JS developers with little experience and zero CS or SWE education rave about how LLMs are so muc…

Yes and look how far we've come in 4 years. If programming has another 4 that's all it has.

I'm just not sure who will end up employed. The near state is obviously jira driven development where agents just pick up tasks from jira, etc. But will that mean the PMs go and we have a technical PM, or will we be the ones binned? Probably for most SMEs it'll just be maybe 1 PM and 2 or so technical PMs churning out tickets.

But whatever. It's the trajectory you should be looking at.

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

#302

Post by godelski » Sat, Feb 14, 2026, 5:23 AM UTC

jrflowers wrote: post #293

refulgentis wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel for you because you kinda got baited into this by the language in the first couple comments. But whatever’s going on in your comment is so emotional that it’s hard to tell what you’re asking for that you haven’t been able to read already, tl;dr proof stuck at n=4 for years is now for arbitrary n

Yeah I kind of fell for it. I was hoping to be pleasantly surprised by a particle physicist in the openai victory lap thread or someone with insight into what “GPT 5.2 originally conjectured this” means exactly because the way it’s phrased in the preprint makes it sound like they were all doing bongrips with chatgpt and it went “man do you guys ever think about gluon tree amplitudes?” but uh, my empty post getting do…

Fwiw I'm not trying to celebrate for OpenAI. The press piece definitely makes bolder claims than the paper.

I was just stating the facts and correcting a reaction that went too far in the other direction. By taking my comment as supporting or validating OpenAI's claim is just as bad. An error of the same magnitude.

I feel like I've been quoting Feynman a lot this week: The first principle is to not fool yourself, and you're the easiest person to fool. You're the easiest person for you to fool because you're as smart as yourself and deception is easier than proving. We all fall for these traps and the smartest people in the world (or history) are not immune to it. But it's interesting to see on a section of the internet that prides itself for its intelligence. I think we just love blinders, which is only human

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

#303

Post by brokencode » Sat, Feb 14, 2026, 5:27 AM UTC

anon84873628 wrote: post #290

loire280 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to fall into a negative mindset when there are legions of pointy haired bosses and bandwagoning CEOs who (wrongly) point at breakthroughs like this as justification for AI mandates or layoffs.

What does "pointy haired" mean? (Presumably not literally?)

Crazy that an honest question like this gets downvoted.

I honestly think the downvote button is pretty trash for online communities. It kills diversity of thought and discussion and leaves you with an echo chamber.

If you disagree with or dislike something, leave a response. Express your view. Save the downvotes for racism, calls for violence, etc.

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

#304

Post by utopiah » Sat, Feb 14, 2026, 5:29 AM UTC

btown wrote: post #118

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It bears repeating that modern LLMs are incredibly capable, and relentless, at solving problems that have a verification test suite. It seems like this problem did (at least for some finite subset of n)! This result, by itself, does not generalize to open-ended problems, though, whether in business or in research in general. Discovering the specification to build is often the majority of the battle. LLMs aren't bad a…

> modern LLMs are incredibly capable, and relentless, at solving problems that have a verification test suite.

Feel like it's a bit what I tried to expressed few weeks ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46791642 namely that we are just pouring computational resources at verifiable problems then claim that astonishingly sometimes it works. Sure LLMs even have a slight bias, namely they do rely on statistics so it's not purely brute force but still the approach is pretty much the same : throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks, once something finally does report it as grandiose and claim to be "intelligent".

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

#305

Post by krackers » Sat, Feb 14, 2026, 5:31 AM UTC

emil-lp wrote: post #284

nxobject wrote: post #282

Man, I'd be more worried about the impact of this on Mathematica than actual humans.

Mathematica guarantees correctness. It should be safe for a while.

Tell that to the various confirmed computational bugs in mathematica :)

https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bugs

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

#306

Post by ramathornn » Sat, Feb 14, 2026, 5:31 AM UTC

cpard wrote: post #231

supern0va wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>AI can be an amazing productivity multiplier for people who know what they're doing. >[...] >The "AI replaces humans in X" narrative is primarily a tool for driving attention and funding. You're sort of acting like it's all or nothing. What about the the humans that used to be that "force multiplier" on a team with the person guiding the research? If a piece of software required a team of ten to people, and instead…

there's 90% job loss assuming that this is a zero sum type of thing where humans and agents compete for working on a fixed amount of work. I'm curious why you think I'm acting like it's all or nothing. What I was trying to communicate is the exact opposite, that it's not all or nothing. Maybe it's the way I articulate things, I'm genuinely interested what makes it sound like this.

Fully agree with your og comment and I didn’t get the same read as the person above at all.

This is a bizarre time to be living in, on one hand these tools are capable of doing more and more of the tasks any knowledge worker today handles, especially when used by an experienced person in X field.

On the other, it feels like something is about to give. All the superbowl ads, AI in what feels like every single piece of copy coming out these days. AI CEOs hopping from one podcast to another warning about the upcoming career apocalypse…I’m not fully buying it.

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

#307

Post by utopiah » Sat, Feb 14, 2026, 5:32 AM UTC

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…

Arguably it's precisely a paradigm shift. Continuing whatever worked until now is within the paradigm, our current theories and tools works, we find few problems that don't fit but that's fine the rest is still progress, we keep on hitting more problems or those few pesky unsolved problems actually appear to be important. We then go back to the theory and its foundations and finally challenge them. We break from the old paradigm and come up with new theories and tools because the first principles are now better understood and we iterate.

So that's actually 2 different regimes on how to proceed. Both are useful but arguably breaking off of the current paradigm is much harder and thus rare.

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

#308

Post by krackers » Sat, Feb 14, 2026, 5:38 AM UTC

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…

Because most times results like this are overstated (see the Cursor browser thing, "moltbook", etc.). There is clear market incentive to overhype things.

And in this case "derives a new result in theoretical physics" is again overstating things, it's closer to "simplify and propose a more general form for a previously worked out sequence of amplitudes" which sounds less magical, and closer to something like what Mathematica could do, or an LLM-enhanced symbolic OEIS. Obviously still powerful and useful, but less hype-y.

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

#309

Post by piombisallow » Sat, Feb 14, 2026, 5:44 AM UTC

utopiah wrote: post #304

btown wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It bears repeating that modern LLMs are incredibly capable, and relentless, at solving problems that have a verification test suite. It seems like this problem did (at least for some finite subset of n)! This result, by itself, does not generalize to open-ended problems, though, whether in business or in research in general. Discovering the specification to build is often the majority of the battle. LLMs aren't bad a…

> modern LLMs are incredibly capable, and relentless, at solving problems that have a verification test suite. Feel like it's a bit what I tried to expressed few weeks ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46791642 namely that we are just pouring computational resources at verifiable problems then claim that astonishingly sometimes it works. Sure LLMs even have a slight bias, namely they do rely on statistics so i…

That's also what most grad students are doing. Even in the unlikely case they completely stop improving, it's still a massive deal.

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

#310

Post by famouswaffles » Sat, Feb 14, 2026, 5:48 AM UTC

D-Machine wrote: post #300

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…

"It's interesting to me that whenever some new result in AI use comes up, there's always a flood of people who come in to gesticulate wildly that that the sky is falling and AGI is imminent. Like with the recent solutions GPT 5.2 has been able to find for Erdos problems, even though in almost all cases such solutions rely on poorly-known past publications, or significant expert user guidance and essential tools like…

>It's interesting to me that whenever some new result in AI use comes up, there's always a flood of people who come in to gesticulate wildly that that the sky is falling and AGI is imminent.

Really? Is that happening in this thread because I can barely see it. Instead you have a bunch of asinine comments butthurt about acknowledging a GPT contribution that would have been acknowledged any day had a human done it.

>they know more about this than Fields medalist Terence Tao, who maintains this list showing that, yes, though these are not interesting proofs to most modern mathematicians, LLMs are a major factor in a tiny minority of these mostly-not-very-interesting proofs

This is part of the problem really. Your framing is disingenuous and I don't really understand why you feel the need to downplay it so. They are interesting proofs. They are documented for a reason. It's not cutting edge research, but it is LLMs contributing meaningfully to formal mathematics, something that was speculative just years ago.