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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

#61

Post by silon42 »

lazide wrote: post #51
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.

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 cr…

> 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.

+1 LLM will help you produce the "filler" nobody wants the read anyway.

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

#62

Post by tonii141 »

constantcrying wrote: post #56
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.

"they just totally failed to live up to expectation"

Because the expectation was too high. If you are aiming for precision, neural networks might not be the best solution for you. That is why generative AI works so well, it doesn’t need to be extremely precise. On the other hand you don't see people use neural networks in system control for cricital processes.

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

#63

Post by swyx »

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? Or even the AI-driven incremental improvements?

literally last week

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphaevolve-a-gemini-p...

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

#64

Post by Flamentono2 »

I'm not sure why people on HN (of all places) are so divided regarding the perception of AI/ML.

I have not seen anything like it before. We literaly had not system or way of even doing things like code generation based on text input.

Just last week i asked for a script to do image segmentation with a basic UI and claude just generated that for me in under 1 Minute.

I could list tons of examples which are groundbreaking. The whole Image generation stack is completly new.

That blog article is fair enough, there is hype around this topic for sure, but alone for every researcher who needs to write code for their research, AI can make them already a lot more efficient.

But i do believe, that we have entered a new ara: An ara were we take data again very serious. A few years back, you said 'the internet doesn't forget' then we realized that yes the internet starts to forget. Google deleted pages, removed the cache feature and it felt like we stoped caring for data because we didn't knew what to do with it.

Then ai came along. And not only is now data king again but we are now in the mids of reinforcment ara: We now give feedback and the systems incorporate that feedback into their training/learning.

And the ai/ml topic is getting worked on on every single aspect of it: Hardware, Algorithm, use cases, data, tools, protocols, etc. We are in the middle of incorporating and building for and on it. This takes a little bit of time. Still the progress is crazy exhausting.

We will only see in a few years if there is a real ceiling. We do need more GPUs, bigger Datacenters to do a lot more experiments on AI architecture and algorithm. We have a clear bottleneck. Big companies train one big model for weeks and month.

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

#65

Post by sailingparrot »

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.

> to anyone that understands the tech it can’t.

This is a ridiculous take that makes me think you might not « understand the tech » as much as you think you do.

Is AI useful today ? That depends on the exact use case but overall it seems pretty clear the hype is greater than the use currently. But sometimes I feel like everyone forgets that ChatGPT isn’t even 3 years old, 6 years ago we were stuck with GPT-2 whose most impressive feat was writing a non sense poem about a unicorn, and AlphaGo is not even 10 years old.

If you can’t see the trend and just think that what we have today is the best we will ever achieve, thus the tech can’t do anything useful, you are getting blinded by contrarianism.

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

#66

Post by dwroberts »

swyx wrote: post #63
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? Or even the AI-driven incremental improvements? literally last week https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphaevolve-a-gemini-p...

But it only seems to be labs and companies that also have a vested interest in selling it as a product that are able to achieve these breakthroughs. Which is a little suspect, right?

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

#67

Post by ktallett »

Flamentono2 wrote: post #60
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.

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 nev…

A lot of these issues you have had are simply user error or not using the right tool for the job.

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

#68

Post by spwa4 »

TLDR: AI is like any new method in software engineering. It is not a general solution, and by itself not that useful, only as an addition. Unless an expert human takes a LOT of time to fine-tune the method (ie. automatically selecting what works well in what case, using the best method in almost all cases) it only performs well in a very small subset of cases.

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

#69

Post by moffkalast »

Ygg2 wrote: post #36
moffkalast wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AlphaEvolve’s procedure found an algorithm to multiply 4x4 complex-valued matrices using 48 scalar multiplications, improving upon Strassen’s 1969 algorithm that was previously known as the best in this setting. This finding demonstrates a significant advance over our previous work, AlphaTensor, which specialized in matrix multiplication algorithms, and for 4x4 matrices, only found improvements for binary arithmeti…

That's less LLM and more three projects by DeepMind team. And it's far from commercial availability.

Well to me personally it at least proves something that's long been touted as impossible, that the current architecture can in fact do better than all humans at novel tasks, even if it needs a crutch at the moment.

An LLM-based system now holds the SOTA approach on several math problems, how crazy is that? I wasn't convinced before, but now I guess it won't be many decades before we view making new scientific advancements as viable as winning against stockfish.

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

#70

Post by denvrede »

lazide wrote: post #51
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.

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 cr…

+1 for all of the above.

> 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.

Especially that one. In the beginning for very structured meetings with a low number of participants it seemed to be ok but once they got more crowded, maybe not all are native speakers and took longer than 30 minutes (like workshops) it went bad.

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