Such tedious derivations used to be a work of poor PhD students who were instrumentalized for such tasks. I envy those who do PhDs in theoretical physics in the age of AI, people can learn so much about their field quicker via chat than reading obstructing papers.
GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics
351–360 of 430 posts
Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics
#352I'm not sure where people think humans are getting these magical leaps of insight that transcend combinations of existing things. Magic? Ghost in the machine? The simplest explanation is that "leaps of insight" are simply novel combinations that demonstrate themselves to have some utility within the boundaries of a test case or objective. Snow + stick + need to clean driveway = snow shovel. Snow shovel + hill + desir…
Some people defend it because they are nondualists. They think the moral value of human life rounds to zero against the existence of something which can effortlessly outclass them in all domains. This is obviously confused, but they can't bring themselves to say "Very cool, and also I think humans are inherently special and deserve to continue existing even if all we do is lie around all day and watch the Hallmark channel."
Happy Valentine's day to those who celebrate btw <3
Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
> GPT 5.2 after crunching 12 hours mathematical formulas supervised and prompted by 4 experts in the field Yet, if some student or child achieved the same – under equal supervision – we would call him the next Einstein.
We would not call him at all because it would be one of the many millions that went through projects like this for their thesis as physics or math graduates. One of my best friends in his bachelor thesis had solved a difficult mathematical problem in planet orbits or something, and it was just yet another random day in academia. And she didn't solve it because she was a genius but because there's a bazillions such pr…
True. If you stay in your domain for a very long time the people with you in that niche space are less and less and when you solve something that wasn't done before it's not necessarily a hard problem.
Still there's no reason to be less proud!
Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics
#354The 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…
I must be a Luddite, how do you have a model working for 12 hours on a problem. Mine is ready with an answer and always interrupts to ask confirmation or show answer
That's on the harness - the device actually sending the prompt to the model. You can write a different harness that feeds the problem back in for however long you want. Ask Claude Code or Codex to build it for you in as minimal a fashion as possible and you'll see that a naïve version is not particularly more complex than `while true; do prompt $file >> file; done` (though it's not that precisely, obviously).
Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics
#355Humans did the actual work: framing the problem, computing base cases, verifying results. GPT just refactored a formula. That's a compiler's job, not a physicist's. Stop letting marketing write science headlines.
Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics
#356Earlier 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…
Even more generally than verification, just being tied to a loss function that represent something we actually care about. E.g. compiler and test errors, LEAN verification in Aristotle, basic physics energy configs in AlphaFold, or win conditions in e.g. RL, such as in AlphaGo. RLHF is an attempt to push LLMs pre-trained with a dopey reconstruction loss toward something we actually care about: imagine if we could fin…
There's been active work in this space, including TruthRL: https://arxiv.org/html/2509.25760v1. It's absolutely not a solved problem, but reducing hallucinations is a key focus of all the labs.
Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics
#357GPT-5.2 can't even process a 1-2 page PDF and give me a subset of the content as a formatted word doc. Nor can it even be truthful about it's own capabilities.
Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> Can humans actually do that? From my reading yes, but I think I am likely reading the statement differently than you are. > from first principles Doing things from first principles is a known strategy, so is guess and check, brute force search, and so on. For an llm to follow a first principles strategy I would expect it to take in a body of research, come up with some first principles or guess at them, then iterat…
"Constructing a solid tower" from first principles is already super-human level. Sure, you can theorize a tower (sans the "solid") from first principles; there's a software architect at my job that does it every day. But the "solid" bit is where things get tricky, because "solid" implies "firm" and "well anchored", and that implies experimental grounds, experimental verification all the way, and final measurable impact. And I'm not even talking particle physics or software engineering; even folding a piece of paper can give you surprising mismatches between theory and results.
Even the realm of pure mathematics and elegant physic theories, where you are supposed to take a set of axioms ("first principles") and build something with it, has cautionary tales such as the Russel paradox or the non-measure of Feymann path integrals, and let's not talk about string theory.
Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics
#359It'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…
The discourse about AI is definitely the worst I've ever experienced in my life.
One group of people saying every amazing breakthrough "doesn't count" because the AI didn't put a cherry on top. Another group of people saying humans are obsolete, I just wrote a web browser with AI bro.
There are some voices out there that are actually examining the boundaries, possibilities and limitations. A lot of good stuff like that makes it onto HN but then if you open the comments it's just intellectual dregs. Very strange.
ISTR there was a similar phenomenon with cryptocurrency. But with that it was always clear the fog of bullshit would blow away sooner or later. But maybe if it hadn't been there, a load of really useful stuff could have come out of the crypto hype wave? Anyway, AI isn't gonna blow over like crypto did. I guess we have more of a runway to grow out of this infantile phase.
Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics
#360The 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…
All you have to do is see "openai.com" in the submission URL to know it's bullshit.