13 ms·

I wonder how long we have until we start solving some truly hard problems with AI. How long until we throw AI at "connect general relativity and quantum physics

I wonder how long we have until we start solving some truly hard problems with AI. How long until we throw AI at "connect general relativity and quantum physics", give the AI 6 months and a few data centers, and have it pop out a solution?

worldsavior 8mo ago
If AGI will ever come, then. Currently, AI is only a statistical machines, and solutions like this are purely based on distribution and no logic/actual intelligence.
- rustyhancock 8mo ago
  I don't even think that's the issue. The issue to my mind is a lack of data at the meeting of QFT/GR. Afterall few humans historically have been capable of the initial true leap between ontologies. But humans are pretty smart so we can't say that is a requirement for AGI.
  - worldsavior 8mo ago
    When it comes to revolutionary/unsolved subjects, there will never be enough data. That's why its revolutionary/unsolved.
  - cjcole 8mo ago
    Maybe. “The laws of nature should be expressed in beautiful equations.” - Paul Dirac “It is, indeed, an incredible fact that what the human mind, at its deepest and most profound, perceives as beautiful finds its realisation in external nature. What is intelligible is also beautiful. We may well ask: how does it happen that beauty in the exact sciences becomes recognizable even before it is understood in detail and before it can be rationally demonstrated? In what does this power of illumination consist?” - Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar “I often follow Plato’s strategy, proposing objects of mathematical beauty as models for Nature.” “It was beauty and symmetry that guided Maxwell and his followers.” - Frank Wilczek “Beauty, is bound up with symmetry.” - Herman Weyl "Still twice in the history of exact natural science has this shining-up of the great interconnection become the decisive signal for significant progress. I am thinking here of two events in the physics of our century: the rise of the theory of relativity and that of the quantum theory. In both cases, after yearlong unsuccessful striving for understanding, a bewildering abundance of details was almost suddenly ordered. This took place when an interconnection emerged which, thought largely unvisualizable, was finally simple in its substance. It convinced through its compactness and abstract beauty – it convinced all those who can understand and speak such an abstract language." - Werner Heisenberg Maybe (just maybe) these things (whatever you want to call them) will (somehow) gain access to some "compact", beautiful, "largely unvisualizable" "interconnection" which will be the self-evident solution. And if they do, many will be sure to label it a statistical accident from a stochastic parrot. And they'll right, for some definitions of "statistical", "accident", "stochastic", and "parrot".
- zarzavat 8mo ago
  I swear that AI could independently develop a cure for cancer and people would still say that it's not actually intelligent, just matrix multiplications giving a statistically probable answer! LLMs are at least designed to be intelligent. Our monkey brains have much less reason to be intelligent, since we only evolved to survive nature, not to understand it. We are at this moment extremely deep into what most people would have been considered to be actual artificial intelligence a mere 15 years ago. We're not quite at human levels of intelligence, but it's close.
  - worldsavior 8mo ago
    That's wrong. Humans were evolved to have big brains so they can better understand the env and use it to their advantage. I still see AI making stupid silly mistakes. I rather think and not waste time on something that only remembers data, and doesn't even understand it. Reasoning in AI is only about finding contradictions between his "thoughts", not actually understand it.
    - someplaceguy 8mo ago
      > I still see AI making stupid silly mistakes. In contrast with humans, who are famously known for never making stupid silly mistakes...
    - _fizz_buzz_ 8mo ago
      > I still see AI making stupid silly mistakes. Humans also make silly mistakes.
  - qsera 8mo ago
    >AI could independently develop a cure for cancer All the answers for all your questions is contained in randomness. If you have a random sentence generator, there is a chance that it will output the answer to this question every time it is invoked. But that does not actually make it intelligent, does it?
    - graemefawcett 8mo ago
- bobbylarrybobby 8mo ago
  Did you read the linked paper? Claude out-reasoned humans on a challenging (or at least, unsolved) math problem.
  - worldsavior 8mo ago
    Merely luck in my opinion. There could be also multiple times where it didn't solve it.
  - cjcole 8mo ago
    "humans" Donald Knuth is an extremal outlier human and the problem is squarely in his field of expertise. Claude, guided by Filip Stappers, a friend of Knuth, solved a problem that Knuth and Stappers had been working on for several weeks. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem (from my quick scan) to have been stated how long (or how many tokens or $) it took for Claude + Stappers to complete the proof. In response, Knuth said: "It seems that I’ll have to revise my opinions about “generative AI” one of these days." Seems like good advice. From reading elsewhere in this comment section, the goalposts seem to be approaching the infrared and will soon disappear from the extreme redshift due to rate at which they are receding with each new achievement.
    - emp17344 8mo ago
      What goalposts do you think are being moved? I constantly see AI enthusiasts use this phrase, but it’s not clear what goalposts they have in mind. Specifically, what is it that you want opponents to recognize that you believe they aren’t currently? We now have a tool that can be useful in some narrow domains in some narrow cases. It’s pretty neat that our tools have new capabilities, but it’s also pretty far from AGI.
      - cjcole 8mo ago
        I'm not an enthusiast. I'm a Butlerian. Imagine hearing pre-attention-is-all-you-need that "AI" could do something that Donald Knuth could not (quickly solve the stated problem in collaboration with his friend). The idea that this (Putnam perfect, IMO gold, etc) is all just "statistical parrot" stuff is wearing a little thin.
- whimsicalism 8mo ago
  It only took 4 years, but it appears that this view is finally dying out on HN. I would advise everyone who found this viewpoint compelling to think about how those same blinders might be affecting how you are imagining the future to look like.
rustyhancock 8mo ago
I think a very long time because part of our limit is experiment. We need enough experimental results to explain to solve these theoretical mismatches and we don't and at present can't explore that frontier. Once we have more results at that frontier we'd build a theory out from there that has two nearly independent limits for QFT and GR. What we'd be asking if the AI is something that we can't expect a human to solve even with a lifetime of effort today. It'll take something in par with Newton realising that the heavens and apples are under the same rules to do it. But at least Newton got to hold the apple and only had to imagine he could a star.
- bob1029 8mo ago
  What prevents us from giving this system access to other real systems that live in physical labs? I don't see much difference between parameterizing and executing a particle accelerator run and invoking some SQL against a provider. It's just JSON on the wire at some level.
  - rustyhancock 8mo ago
    Nothing, we can give it all the data we have and have it lead experiments. But we can not yet experiment at the GR/QFT frontier. To do so with a particle accelerator it would need to be the size of the milky way.
- fragmede 8mo ago
  The question is, if you trained an LLM on everything up until 1904, could it come up with E=MC² or not?
  - rustyhancock 8mo ago
    In 1900 Henri Poincaré wrote that radiation (light) has an effective mass given by E/c^2. So it really isn't far fetched. What intrigues me more is if it was capable of it would our Victorian conservative minded scientists have RLHF it out of that kind of thing?
- eru 8mo ago
graemefawcett 8mo ago
Connecting them is easy, one is the math of the exchange and one of the state machine. A better question might be why no one is paying more attention to Barandes at Harvard. He's been publishing the answer to that question for a while, if you stop trying to smuggle a Markovian embedding in a non-Markovian process you stop getting weird things like infinities at boundaries that can't be worked out from current position alone. But you could just dump a prompt into an LLM and pull the handle a few dozen times and see what pops out too. Maybe whip up a Claw skill or two Unconstrained solution space exploration is surely the way to solve the hard problems Ask those Millenium Prize guys how well that's working out :) Constraint engineering is all software development has ever been, or did we forget how entropy works? Someone should remind the folk chasing P=NP that the observer might need a pen to write down his answers, or are we smuggling more things for free that change the entire game? As soon as the locations of the witness cost, our poor little guy can't keep walking that hypercube forever. Can he? Maybe 6 months and a few data centers will do it ;)
emp17344 8mo ago
Hold your horses, that’s a long way off. The best math AI tool we currently have, Aletheia, was only able to solve 13 out of 700 attempted open Erdos problems, only 4 of which were solved autonomously: https://arxiv.org/html/2601.22401v3 https://arxiv.org/html/2601.22401v3 Clearly, these models still struggle with novel problems.
- slibhb 8mo ago
  > Clearly, these models still struggle with novel problems. Do they struggle with novel problems more or less than humans?
  - Filligree 8mo ago
    Less than most humans, but more than many humans.
piokoch 8mo ago
You will get a usual AI slop that will be the mixture of the articles and books it was trained on. You can try it even now.

worldsavior 8mo ago

If AGI will ever come, then. Currently, AI is only a statistical machines, and solutions like this are purely based on distribution and no logic/actual intelligence.

rustyhancock 8mo ago
I don't even think that's the issue. The issue to my mind is a lack of data at the meeting of QFT/GR. Afterall few humans historically have been capable of the initial true leap between ontologies. But humans are pretty smart so we can't say that is a requirement for AGI.
- worldsavior 8mo ago
  When it comes to revolutionary/unsolved subjects, there will never be enough data. That's why its revolutionary/unsolved.
- cjcole 8mo ago
  Maybe. “The laws of nature should be expressed in beautiful equations.” - Paul Dirac “It is, indeed, an incredible fact that what the human mind, at its deepest and most profound, perceives as beautiful finds its realisation in external nature. What is intelligible is also beautiful. We may well ask: how does it happen that beauty in the exact sciences becomes recognizable even before it is understood in detail and before it can be rationally demonstrated? In what does this power of illumination consist?” - Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar “I often follow Plato’s strategy, proposing objects of mathematical beauty as models for Nature.” “It was beauty and symmetry that guided Maxwell and his followers.” - Frank Wilczek “Beauty, is bound up with symmetry.” - Herman Weyl "Still twice in the history of exact natural science has this shining-up of the great interconnection become the decisive signal for significant progress. I am thinking here of two events in the physics of our century: the rise of the theory of relativity and that of the quantum theory. In both cases, after yearlong unsuccessful striving for understanding, a bewildering abundance of details was almost suddenly ordered. This took place when an interconnection emerged which, thought largely unvisualizable, was finally simple in its substance. It convinced through its compactness and abstract beauty – it convinced all those who can understand and speak such an abstract language." - Werner Heisenberg Maybe (just maybe) these things (whatever you want to call them) will (somehow) gain access to some "compact", beautiful, "largely unvisualizable" "interconnection" which will be the self-evident solution. And if they do, many will be sure to label it a statistical accident from a stochastic parrot. And they'll right, for some definitions of "statistical", "accident", "stochastic", and "parrot".
zarzavat 8mo ago
I swear that AI could independently develop a cure for cancer and people would still say that it's not actually intelligent, just matrix multiplications giving a statistically probable answer! LLMs are at least designed to be intelligent. Our monkey brains have much less reason to be intelligent, since we only evolved to survive nature, not to understand it. We are at this moment extremely deep into what most people would have been considered to be actual artificial intelligence a mere 15 years ago. We're not quite at human levels of intelligence, but it's close.
- worldsavior 8mo ago
  That's wrong. Humans were evolved to have big brains so they can better understand the env and use it to their advantage. I still see AI making stupid silly mistakes. I rather think and not waste time on something that only remembers data, and doesn't even understand it. Reasoning in AI is only about finding contradictions between his "thoughts", not actually understand it.
  - someplaceguy 8mo ago
    > I still see AI making stupid silly mistakes. In contrast with humans, who are famously known for never making stupid silly mistakes...
  - _fizz_buzz_ 8mo ago
    > I still see AI making stupid silly mistakes. Humans also make silly mistakes.
- qsera 8mo ago
  >AI could independently develop a cure for cancer All the answers for all your questions is contained in randomness. If you have a random sentence generator, there is a chance that it will output the answer to this question every time it is invoked. But that does not actually make it intelligent, does it?
  - graemefawcett 8mo ago
bobbylarrybobby 8mo ago
Did you read the linked paper? Claude out-reasoned humans on a challenging (or at least, unsolved) math problem.
- worldsavior 8mo ago
  Merely luck in my opinion. There could be also multiple times where it didn't solve it.
- cjcole 8mo ago
  "humans" Donald Knuth is an extremal outlier human and the problem is squarely in his field of expertise. Claude, guided by Filip Stappers, a friend of Knuth, solved a problem that Knuth and Stappers had been working on for several weeks. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem (from my quick scan) to have been stated how long (or how many tokens or $) it took for Claude + Stappers to complete the proof. In response, Knuth said: "It seems that I’ll have to revise my opinions about “generative AI” one of these days." Seems like good advice. From reading elsewhere in this comment section, the goalposts seem to be approaching the infrared and will soon disappear from the extreme redshift due to rate at which they are receding with each new achievement.
  - emp17344 8mo ago
    What goalposts do you think are being moved? I constantly see AI enthusiasts use this phrase, but it’s not clear what goalposts they have in mind. Specifically, what is it that you want opponents to recognize that you believe they aren’t currently? We now have a tool that can be useful in some narrow domains in some narrow cases. It’s pretty neat that our tools have new capabilities, but it’s also pretty far from AGI.
    - cjcole 8mo ago
      I'm not an enthusiast. I'm a Butlerian. Imagine hearing pre-attention-is-all-you-need that "AI" could do something that Donald Knuth could not (quickly solve the stated problem in collaboration with his friend). The idea that this (Putnam perfect, IMO gold, etc) is all just "statistical parrot" stuff is wearing a little thin.
whimsicalism 8mo ago
It only took 4 years, but it appears that this view is finally dying out on HN. I would advise everyone who found this viewpoint compelling to think about how those same blinders might be affecting how you are imagining the future to look like.

rustyhancock 8mo ago

I think a very long time because part of our limit is experiment. We need enough experimental results to explain to solve these theoretical mismatches and we don't and at present can't explore that frontier. Once we have more results at that frontier we'd build a theory out from there that has two nearly independent limits for QFT and GR. What we'd be asking if the AI is something that we can't expect a human to solve even with a lifetime of effort today. It'll take something in par with Newton realising that the heavens and apples are under the same rules to do it. But at least Newton got to hold the apple and only had to imagine he could a star.

bob1029 8mo ago
What prevents us from giving this system access to other real systems that live in physical labs? I don't see much difference between parameterizing and executing a particle accelerator run and invoking some SQL against a provider. It's just JSON on the wire at some level.
- rustyhancock 8mo ago
  Nothing, we can give it all the data we have and have it lead experiments. But we can not yet experiment at the GR/QFT frontier. To do so with a particle accelerator it would need to be the size of the milky way.
fragmede 8mo ago
The question is, if you trained an LLM on everything up until 1904, could it come up with E=MC² or not?
- rustyhancock 8mo ago
  In 1900 Henri Poincaré wrote that radiation (light) has an effective mass given by E/c^2. So it really isn't far fetched. What intrigues me more is if it was capable of it would our Victorian conservative minded scientists have RLHF it out of that kind of thing?
eru 8mo ago

graemefawcett 8mo ago

Connecting them is easy, one is the math of the exchange and one of the state machine. A better question might be why no one is paying more attention to Barandes at Harvard. He's been publishing the answer to that question for a while, if you stop trying to smuggle a Markovian embedding in a non-Markovian process you stop getting weird things like infinities at boundaries that can't be worked out from current position alone. But you could just dump a prompt into an LLM and pull the handle a few dozen times and see what pops out too. Maybe whip up a Claw skill or two Unconstrained solution space exploration is surely the way to solve the hard problems Ask those Millenium Prize guys how well that's working out :) Constraint engineering is all software development has ever been, or did we forget how entropy works? Someone should remind the folk chasing P=NP that the observer might need a pen to write down his answers, or are we smuggling more things for free that change the entire game? As soon as the locations of the witness cost, our poor little guy can't keep walking that hypercube forever. Can he? Maybe 6 months and a few data centers will do it ;)

emp17344 8mo ago

Hold your horses, that’s a long way off. The best math AI tool we currently have, Aletheia, was only able to solve 13 out of 700 attempted open Erdos problems, only 4 of which were solved autonomously: https://arxiv.org/html/2601.22401v3 https://arxiv.org/html/2601.22401v3 Clearly, these models still struggle with novel problems.

slibhb 8mo ago
> Clearly, these models still struggle with novel problems. Do they struggle with novel problems more or less than humans?
- Filligree 8mo ago
  Less than most humans, but more than many humans.

piokoch 8mo ago

You will get a usual AI slop that will be the mixture of the articles and books it was trained on. You can try it even now.