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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

It's an obvious tension created by the title.

The reality is: "GPT 5.2 found a more general and scalable form of an equation, after crunching for 12 hours supervised by 4 experts in the field".

Which is equivalent to taking some of the countless niche algorithms out there and have few experts in that algo have LLMs crunch tirelessly till they find a better formula. After same experts prompted it in the right direction and with the right feedback.

Interesting? Sure. Speaks highly of AI? Yes.

Does it suggest that AI is revolutionizing theoretical physics on its own like the title does? Nope.

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> GPT 5.2 after crunching 12 hours mathematical formulas supervised and prompted by 4 experts in the field

Yet, if some student or child achieved the same – under equal supervision – we would call him the next Einstein.

We would not call him at all because it would be one of the many millions that went through projects like this for their thesis as physics or math graduates.

One of my best friends in his bachelor thesis had solved a difficult mathematical problem in planet orbits or something, and it was just yet another random day in academia.

And she didn't solve it because she was a genius but because there's a bazillions such problems out there and little time to look at them and focus. Science is huge.

A lot of AI worship is midwits gazing in awe at the mediocre accomplishments of the 130+ IQ.

(Still sane to be scared for the future).

True. If you stay in your domain for a very long time the people with you in that niche space are less and less and when you solve something that wasn't done before it's not necessarily a hard problem.

Still there's no reason to be less proud!

Yes and if a 1 year old could multiply 1357329 by 28384743, I'd be impressed and yet I still wouldn't be impressed by a calculator doing it.

You would if it was the first time ever that a calculator achieved this feat.

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