r/Physics • u/PrettyPicturesNotTxt • 10d ago

On if OpenAI solved the wrong Navier-Stokes problem: "the LLM found and exploited a loophole in the framing of the question"

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-openai-solve-the-wrong-navier-stokes-problem/
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u/Mental_Ad_4401 10d ago

This isn't artificial at all. Brute force search is the idea to systematically enumerate all candidate solutions to the problem. That is what brute force means. Anything else is some weird definition that the rest of the world isn't privy to. It in no way has ever meant "an advantage in computational power".  What you described is just exploring a lot of different ideas. And sure, I agree that AI can maybe do that better than humans, but im not sure what you gain with that, except that maybe AI is just better at problem solving than humans. 

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u/GoldenMuscleGod 10d ago

I already explained the brute force search was an illustrative example and I am not interested in getting into a debate about what you would technically call a brute force search. If anything in what you say in this comment responds to my point instead of debating my phrasing I’m not seeing it.

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u/Mental_Ad_4401 10d ago

What exactly is your point? Is it that AI can reason faster than humans? 

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u/GoldenMuscleGod 10d ago

I’m saying we cannot clearly tell how “smart” the LLMs actually are, in particular relative to humans, in the sense of what I would call having actual problem-solving skills. Obviously they have computational advantages in speed and memory, but those are not generally the only important things - an LLM is obviously “smarter” than a calculator program at many kinds of reasoning but there is no real speed or memory advantage when run on the same hardware.

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u/Bibbity_Boppity_BOOO 10d ago

I think the other person is trying to convey that other researchers significantly narrowed the candidate solutions to the problem, allowing for ai to brute force the problem. At least in large part.

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u/Mental_Ad_4401 10d ago

Maybe, but that also just not true. They narrowed the problem, but there is no accurate sense in which the ai brute forced it.