Adam Brown

And it is perhaps going to build more sophisticated representations than we have.

Often in the history of physics, a...

Breakthrough is just how you think about it, what representation you do.

It is sometimes jokingly said that Einstein's greatest contribution to physics was a certain notation he invented called the Einstein summation convention, which allowed you to more easily express and think about these things in a more compact way that strips away some of the other things.

Penrose, one of his great contributions was just inventing a new notation for thinking about some of these space times and how they work that made certain other things clear.

So clearly, coming up with the right representation has been an incredibly powerful tool in the history of physics and many incredibly large developments, somewhat analogous to coming up with a new

experimental technique in some of the more applied scientific domains.

And yeah, one would hope that

as these large language models get better, they come up with better representations, at least better representations for them that may not be the same as a good representation for us.

Yeah, so what...

What physicists don't do, or don't productively do, is just say, LLM, please quantize gravity for me, go.

That doesn't get you anywhere.

But physicists are starting to use them in a big way, but just not for that.

More of an assistant rather than agent.

Three years ago, there was totally no value whatsoever in them.

Like low-hanging fruit uses include doing literature search.

So if you just say, you know, I have this idea, what are some relevant papers?

They're great at that.

It's semantically greater than any other kind of search.

The other thing that they're extremely useful for now that they were useful for is just as a tutor.