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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

#41

Post by perlgeek »

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…

> Where are the AI-driven breakthroughs?

The only thing that seems to live up to the hype is AlphaFold, which predicts protein folding based on amino acid sequences, and of which people say that it actually makes their work significantly easier.

But, disclaimer, this is only from second-hand knowledge, I'm not working in the field.

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

#42

Post by tonii141 »

This article addresses the misconception that arises when someone lacks a clear understanding of the underlying mathematics of neural networks and mistakenly believes they are a magical solution capable of solving every problem. While neural networks are powerful tools, using them effectively requires knowledge and experience to determine when they are appropriate and when alternative approaches are better suited.

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

#43

Post by rafaelmn »

perlgeek wrote: post #41
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…

> Where are the AI-driven breakthroughs? The only thing that seems to live up to the hype is AlphaFold, which predicts protein folding based on amino acid sequences, and of which people say that it actually makes their work significantly easier. But, disclaimer, this is only from second-hand knowledge, I'm not working in the field.

This is another dimension of the problem - what's even considered AI ? AlphaFold is a very specialized model - and I feel the AI boom is driven by hypothesis that general models eventually outperform specialized ones given enough size/data/whatever.

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

#44

Post by bgnn »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #39
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.

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.

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

#45

Post by geremiiah »

omneity wrote: post #15

The article initially appears to suggest that all AI in science (or at least the author’s field) is hype. But their gripe seems to be specific to an architecture named PINN that seems to be overhyped, as they mention in the end how they end up using other DL models to successfully compute PDEs faster than traditional numerical methods.

It's more widespread than PINNs. PINNs have been widely known to be rubbish a long time ago. But the general failure of using ML for physics problems is much more widespread.

Where ML generally shines is either when you have relatively lots of experimental data with respect to a fairly narrow domain. This is the case for machine learned interatomic potentials MLIPs which have been a thing since the '90s. Also potentially the case for weather modelling (but I do not want to comment about that). Or when you have absolute insane amounts of data, and you train a really huge model. This is what we refer to as AI. This is basically why Alphafold is successful, and Alphafold still fails to produce good results when you query it on inputs that are far from any data points in its training data.

But most ML for physics problems tend to be somewhere in between. Lacking experimental data and working with not enough simulation data because it is so expensive to produce. And also training models that are not large enough, because inference would be too slow, anyway, if they were too big. And then expecting these models to learn a very wide range of physics.

And then everyone jumps in on the hype train, because it is so easy to give it a shot. And everyone gets the same dud results. But then they publish anyway. And if the lab/PI is famous enough or if they formulate the problem in a way that is unique and looks sciency or mathy, they might even get their paper in a good journal/conference and get lots of citations. But in the end, they still only end up with the same results as everyone else: replicates the training data to some extent, somebody else should work on the generalizability problem.

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

#46

Post by ktallett »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #39
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.

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.

The hype surrounding them is not as a pa and tbh a lot of these use cases already have existing methods that work just fine. There are ways to find key information in files already, and speedy meeting minutes is really just a template away.

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

#47

Post by yfontana »

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…

From the article:

> Besides protein folding, the canonical example of a scientific breakthrough from AI, a few examples of scientific progress from AI include:1

> Weather forecasting, where AI forecasts have had up to 20% higher accuracy (though still lower resolution) compared to traditional physics-based forecasts.

> Drug discovery, where preliminary data suggests that AI-discovered drugs have been more successful in Phase I (but not Phase II) clinical trials. If the trend holds, this would imply a nearly twofold increase in end-to-end drug approval rates.

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

#48

Post by strogonoff »

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…

There is rarely a constructive discussion around the term “AI”. You can’t say anything useful about what it might lead to or how useful it might be, because it is purely a marketing term that does not have a specific meaning (neither do both of the words in its abbreviation).

Interesting discussions tend to avoid “AI” in favour of specific terms such as “ML”, “LLM”, “GAN”, “stable diffusion”, “chatbot”, “image generation”. These terms refer to specific tech and applications of that tech, and allow to argue about specific consequences for sciences or society (use of ML in biotech vs. proliferation of chatbots).

However, certain sub-industries prefer “AI” precisely because it’s so vague, offers seemingly unlimited potential (please give us more investment money/stonks go up), and creates a certain vibe of a conscious being useful when pretending not to be working around IP laws and creating tools based on data obtained without relevant licensing agreements (cf. the countless “if humans have the freedom to read, therefore it’s unfair to restrict the uses of a software tool” fallacies, often perpetuated even by seemingly technically literate people, in pretty much every relevant forum thread).

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

#49

Post by waldrews »

guardian5x wrote: post #38
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.

AI looks exactly like NFTs to you? I don't understand what you mean by that. AI already has tons more uses.

One is a technical advance as important as anything in human history, realizing a dream most informed thinkers thought would remain science fiction long past our lifetimes, upending our understanding of intelligence, computation, language, knowledge, evolution, prediction, psychology... before we even mention practical applications.

The other is worse than nothing.

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