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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

#51

Post by lazide »

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.

Having tried to use various tools - in those specific examples - I found them either pointless or actively harmful.

Writing emails - once I knew what I wanted to convey, the rest was so trivial as to not matter, and any LLM tooling just got in the way of actually expressing it as I ended up trying to tweak the junk it was producing.

Meeting minutes - I have yet to see one that didn’t miss something important while creating a lot of junk that no one ever read.

And while I’m sure someone somewhere has had luck with the document search/extract stuff, my experience has been that the hard part was understanding something, and then finding it in the doc or being reminded of it was easy. If someone didn’t understand something, the AI summary or search was useless because they didn’t know what they were seeing.

I’ve also seen a LOT of both junior and senior people end up in a haze because they couldn’t figure out what was going on - and the AI tooling just allowed them to produce more junk that didn’t make any sense, rather than engage their brain. Which causes more junk for everyone to get overwhelmed with.

IMO, a lot of the ‘productivity’ isn’t actually, it’s just semi coherent noise.

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

#52

Post by shalmanese »

This is less an article about AI and more about, one of the less talked about functions of a PhD program is becoming literate at “reading” academic claims beyond their face value.

None of the claims made in the article are surprising because they’re the natural outgrowth of the hodgepodge of incentives we’ve accreted as what we call “science” over time and you just need to practice over time to be able to place the output of science in the proper context and understand that a “paper” is an artifact of a sociotechnical system with all the entailing complexity that demands.

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

#53

Post by rkuodys »

ktallett wrote: post #46
StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What I see LLMs at this point is simplified input and output solutions with reduced barriers of entry. So application could become more widespread.

Now that I think of it, maybe this AI era is not electricity, but rather GUI - like the time when Jobs(or whoever) figured out and adopted modern GUI on computers allowing more widespread uses of computer

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

#54

Post by ktallett »

geremiiah wrote: post #12
rhubarbtree wrote: post #5

I think this is mostly just a repeat of the problems of academia - no longer truth-seeking, instead focused on citations and careerism. AI is just a.n.other topic where that is happening.

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…

HPCs are usually in Collab with universities for specific science research. Using up their resources is hopping on the bandwagon to damage another industry.an industry (AI) which is neither new nor anywhere close to being anything more than an personal assistant at the moment. Not even a great one at that.

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

#55

Post by fabian2k »

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…

I suspect that people saying this are avoiding to make broad conclusions based only on the AI tools that exist right now at this moment. So they leave a lot of room for the next versions to improve.

Maybe too much room, but it's hard to predict if AI tools will overcome their limitations in the near future.

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

#56

Post by constantcrying »

tonii141 wrote: post #42

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.

This does not apply to PINNs though. They were used and investigated by people deeply knowledgeable about numerics and neural networks, they just totally failed to live up to expectation.

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

#57

Post by ktallett »

raesene9 wrote: post #10

Interesting article. There is always risk that a new hot technique will get more attention that it ultimately warrants. For me the key quote in the article is "Most scientists aren’t trying to mislead anyone, but because they face strong incentives to present favorable results, there’s still a risk that you’ll be misled." Understanding people's incentives is often very useful when you're looking at what they're sayin…

There are those who have realised they can make a lot of cash from it and also get funding by using the term AI. But at the end of the day what software doesn't have some machine learning built in. It's nothing new, nor is the current implementations particularly extraordinary or accurate.

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

#58

Post by Flamentono2 »

simianparrot wrote: post #28
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…

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.

We already have breakthroughs. Benchmark results which have been unheard of before ML.

Alone language translation got so much better, voice syntesis, voice transcription.

All my meetings now are searchable and i can ask 'ai' to summarize my meetings in a relative accurate way impossible before that.

Alphafold made a breakthrough in protein folding.

Image and Video generation can now do unbelievable things.

Realtime voice communication with computer.

Our internal company search suddenly became usefull.

I have 0 use case for NFT and Crypto. I have tons of use case for ML.

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

#59

Post by ktallett »

rkuodys wrote: post #53
ktallett wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What I see LLMs at this point is simplified input and output solutions with reduced barriers of entry. So application could become more widespread. Now that I think of it, maybe this AI era is not electricity, but rather GUI - like the time when Jobs(or whoever) figured out and adopted modern GUI on computers allowing more widespread uses of computer

Do they only have reduced barriers of entry if you aren't fussed about the accuracy of the output? If you care that everything works correctly and is factually correct, do you not need the same competency as just doing the task by hand.

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

#60

Post by Flamentono2 »

ktallett wrote: post #46
StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Absolutly not true

I was not able to get meeting transcription in that quality that cheap ever before. I followed dictation software for over a decade and tx to ML the open source software is suddenly a lot better than ever before.

Our internal company search with state of the art search indexes and search software was always shit. Now i ask an agent about a product standard and it just finds it.

Image generation never existed before.

Building a chatbot in a way that it actually does what you expect and its more complicated than answering the same 10 theoretical features it can do was hard and never really good and it now just works.

Im also not aware of any software rewriting or even writing documents for me, structer them etc.

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