Comment by nilkn
10 days ago
It would be more accurate to say that humans using GPT-5.2 derived a new result in theoretical physics (or, if you're being generous, humans and GPT-5.2 together derived a new result). The title makes it sound like GPT-5.2 produced a complete or near-complete paper on its own, but what it actually did was take human-derived datapoints, conjecture a generalization, then prove that generalization. Having scanned the paper, this seems to be a significant enough contribution to warrant a legitimate author credit, but I still think the title on its own is an exaggeration.
Would you be similarly pedantic if a high-schooler did the same?
Yes. Someone making one contribution among many to a paper clearly does not deserve anything like sole authorship credit of the entire paper, which is what the title from OpenAI implies to me. I don't believe I'm being pedantic at all. And, by the way, high schoolers or college students make co-author-level contributions to real papers quite frequently in the US at least (I was one of them).
The text of the post is much more honest. The title is where the dishonesty is.
Hi, I'm an author on the paper. It was definitely a human-AI collaboration, but it is also true that the final simplified formula, Eq. 39 in the paper (which is what we had been seeking, without success), was conjectured and proved by GPT. So it derived a new result in theoretical physics. I'm genuinely puzzled by your complaint.