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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

#71

Post by littlestymaar »

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.

> It’s why it keeps looking exactly like NFT’s and crypto hype cycles to me: Yes the technology has legitimate uses

AI have legitimate uses, cryptocurrency only has “regulations evasion” and NFT has literally no use at all, though.

But that's very true that the AI ecosystem is crowded with grifters who feed on baseless hype, and many of them actually come from cryptocurrencies.

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

#72

Post by amarcheschi »

mzl wrote: post #32
baxtr wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give brief summary why this paper is a breakthrough for an outsider of the field?

Checking it shortly (I haven't seen the paper before) this seems to be a very good analysis of how results are reported specifically for medical imaging benchmarks. As is often the case with statistics, selecting just a single number to report (whatever that number is) will hide a lot of different behaviours. Here, they show that just using the mean is a bad way to report data as the confidence intervals (reconstruct…

Hell, I was asked to use confidence interval as well as average values for by bs thesis when doing ml benchmarks and scientist publishing results in medical fields aren't doing it...

How can something like that happen? I mean, i had a supervisor tell me "add the confidence interval to the results as well", and explained me why. I guess that at nobody ever told them? Or they didn't care? Or it's just a honest mistake

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

#73

Post by uludag »

Flamentono2 wrote: post #58
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.

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 v…

I'm sure there's many people out there who could say that they hardly use AI but that crypto has made them lots of money.

At the end of the day searching work documents and talking with computers is only desirable inasmuch as they are economically profitable. Crypto at the end of the day is responsible for a lot of people getting wealthy. Was a lot of this wealth obtained on sketchy grounds? probably, but the same could be said AI (for example, the recent sale of windsurf for an obscene amount of money).

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

#74

Post by _0ffh »

rafaelmn wrote: post #43
perlgeek wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

While I hate the apparent renaming of everything ML to "AI", things like AlphaFold would be "narrow AI".

As to the common idea of having to wait for general AI (AGI) to bring the gains, I have been quite sure since the start of the recent AI hype cycle that narrow AI will have silently transformed much of the world before AGI even hits the town.

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

#76

Post by cornholio »

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.

For now, the reasoning abilities of the best and largest models are somewhat on par with those of a human crackpot with an internet connection, that misunderstands some wild fact or theory and starts to speculate dumb and ridiculous "discoveries". So the real world application to scientific thought is low, because science does not lack imbeciles.

But of course, models always improve and they never grow tired (if enough VC money is available), and even an idiot can stumble upon low hanging fruits overlooked by the brightest minds. This tireless ability to do systematic or brute-force reasoning about non-frontier subjects is bound to produce some useful results like those you mention.

The comparison with a pure financial swindle and speculative mania like NFTs is of course an exaggeration.

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

#77

Post by Wilsoniumite »

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…

Some new ish maths has been discovered. It's up to you if this is valid or impressive enough, but I think it's significant for things to come: https://youtu.be/sGCmu7YKgPA?si=EG9i0xGHhDu1Tb0O

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

#78

Post by shusaku »

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…

> Or even the AI-driven incremental improvements?

You have no idea what you are talking about. Every day there is plenty of research published that used AI to help achieve scientific goals.

Now LLMs are another matter, and probably a ways off before we reap the benefit beyond day to day programming / writing productivity.

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

#79

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

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.

Microsoft is absolutely selling them as pa and already selling a lot. I think HNers being mostly software developers live in a bubble when it comes to the reality of what LLMs are actually used for.

Speedy minutes are absolutely not a template away. Anyone who ever had to write minutes for a complicated meetings knows it’s hard and requires a lot of back and forth for everyone to agree about what was said and decided.

Now you just turn on Copilot and you get both a transcript and an adequate basis for good minutes. Bonus point: it’s made by a machine so no one complains it has bias.

Some people here are blind to how useful that is.

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

#80

Post by littlestymaar »

uludag wrote: post #73
Flamentono2 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 v…

I'm sure there's many people out there who could say that they hardly use AI but that crypto has made them lots of money. At the end of the day searching work documents and talking with computers is only desirable inasmuch as they are economically profitable. Crypto at the end of the day is responsible for a lot of people getting wealthy. Was a lot of this wealth obtained on sketchy grounds? probably, but the same co…

> is only desirable inasmuch as they are economically profitable.

The bug difference is that they are profitable because they create value, when cryptocurrencies are a zero sum game between participants. (It is in fact a negative-sum game, since some people are getting paid to make the thing work so that others can gamble on the system).

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