Adam Brown

if there is a huge amount of physics that a physicist would be expected to – that has already been done, and no human has ever read the whole literature or understands everything, or maybe there isn't even something that you feel you should understand or you once understood that you don't understand.

And I think the very best thing in the world for that would be to phone up a colleague and say –

If you knew exactly who to phone, they'd probably be able to answer your question the best.

But it's certainly, if you just ask a large language model,

You get great answers, probably better than all but the very best person you could phone.

And they know about a huge amount.

They're non-judgmental.

They will not only tell you what the right answer is, but debug your understanding on the wrong answer.

So I think a lot of physics professors are using them just as personal tutors.

And it fills a hole because there are personal... If you want to know how to do something basic, there is...

typically very well documented.

If you want to know quite advanced topics, there are not often good resources for them.

And talking to these language models will often help you debug and understand your understanding.

And it'll explain to you not only what the right answer is, but what you thought was wrong.

And I think it'll be a pretty big deal, sort of analogous to the way that...

Chess players today are much better, even when they're playing across the board without the benefit of a computer, just having been able to be tutored by chess machines off the board.

And this is the same.

You want to understand this thing about group theory, go and ask the machine and it'll explain it to you and it won't judge you while it's doing it.

Yes, they definitely have different strengths and weaknesses than humans.

And obviously one of their strengths is that they have read way more than any human will ever read in their entire life.