Comment by turzmo
2 months ago
Physicist here. Did you guys actually read the paper? Am I missing something? The "key" AI-conjectured formula (39) is an obvious generalization of (35)-(38), and something a human would have guessed immediately.
(35)-(38) are the AI-simplified versions of (29)-(32). Those earlier formulae look formidable to simplify by hand, but they are also the sort of thing you'd try to use a computer algebra system for.
I'm willing to (begrudgingly) admit the possibility for AI to do novel work, but this particular result does not seem very impressive.
I picture ChatGPT as the rich kid whose parents privately donated to a lab to get their name on a paper for college admissions. In this case, I don't think I'm being too cynical in thinking that something similar is happening here and that the role of AI in this result is being well overplayed.
Also a physicist here -- I had the same reaction. Going from (35-38) to (39) doesn't look like much of a leap for a human. They say (35-38) was obtained from the full result by the LLM, but if the authors derived the full expression in (29-32) themselves presumably they could do the special case too? (given it's much simpler). The more I read the post and preprint the less clear it is which parts the LLM did.
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Random anonymous HN driveby claiming something that'd be horrible PR; or the coauthors on the GPT-5.2 paper...and the belief OpenAI isn't aggressively stupid, especially after earlier negative press....gotta say, going with the coauthors, after seeing their credentials.
I think you're misunderstanding my claim. There's no scandal here, just run-of-the-mill academic politicking. I fully believe that ChatGPT did the work they say it did, but that it deserves about as much credit as Mathematica does in "deriving a new result".
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