Wow. @physics_nate (currently on leave at OpenAI) has made significant progress on a very deep problem relevant to our understanding of the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. It’s technical, but briefly: the matter content of the SM (electrons, quarks, etc) are fermions and they are “chiral” (they have left-handed and right-handed components that behave differently). We’ve lacked a good way to describe / simulate such systems “non-perturbatively” (which is a controlled way of doing approximations). The paper connects with foundational ideas laid out by Lüscher (who is wicked smaht) and uses GOT Astra + lean formalization in ways that are perhaps subtly different than in math because of the role of recorded assumptions vs. axioms.

It is important to center the fact that Claude built on the approach that my colleague Lance developed, used tools that the field has developed, and (from what I have been told) used results in some of our recent papers. It’s a huge accomplishment, but should be framed as a combination of human and AI contributions. (To @AnthropicAI’s credit, I think the article does a pretty good job of this.) The fact that Claude can take a single people and figure out how to integrate the knowledge and use the tools as amazing, but it’s not coming out of the vacuum. This is an important opportunity for us to start to frame these developments, recognizing the human contributions and the power of these new tools. This is not an exemplar of the bitter lesson!

Wow, I just found out that our team has been scooped by @AnthropicAI See the addendum of the post “How does it feel to be scooped by a machine?” written by my collaborator Lance Dixon (who was under NDA while checking the result) I’m still processing, but not entirely surprised. I do I wish we had the time in the resources to commit to it.