Physicist: AI is turning science into a Library of Babel nobody will read
Why are we even doing all this?
In a guest post on Terry Tao's blog, theoretical physicist Rikab Gambhir skewers the AI hype in mathematics and physics. He argues that tools like OpenAI's latest are generating thousands of papers that look correct but are incomprehensible and unverified, outsourcing the hard work of checking and understanding to humans. The result, he says, is a flood of potentially true factoids that nobody will ever read, driven by a perverse incentive to prioritize quantity over insight.
In centuries past, scientists and mathematicians were limited in their ability to solve problems by their ability to understand the solutions. This bottleneck has been removed, and now there is no theoretical limit to the amount of scientific and mathematical factoids we can fail to understand.