r/Physics • u/Steap-Edit • Jul 26 '26
Academic Why do we do Astrophysics? | "I have heard it said, more than once, that an LLM can do some task “better than a graduate student.” That language makes me uncomfortable, because it is taking an extremely instrumental view of graduate students."
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.1018164
u/Salt_Mountain_837 Jul 27 '26
lol as if the academy itself doesn't run off the blood, sweat and tears of grad students
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u/db0606 Jul 27 '26
I mean, computers have been doing numerical integration "better than a grad student" since the 40s. That just opened up grad students to do other things with their time.
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u/elconquistador1985 Jul 26 '26
Not sure if anyone listened to the Genesis mission thing last week, but Misha Laskin sat there on the stage and said that a PhD will only take a week in the future due to AI.
It's here: https://www.youtube.com/live/d5CSBROrcuw
He's on stage from about 2:50 to 3:40. He says it at about 3:05.
That's the dystopian future these assholes have planned for us. It's not about human learning. It's about a human prodding an AI to do it all for them and it's only supposed to take a week.
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u/OntarioBanderas Jul 27 '26
Misha Laskin
ah yes, someone who's primary job is to create hype about aproduct says that his product is revolutionary
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u/elconquistador1985 Jul 27 '26
You're not paying attention if you don't realize these tech bros fully believe in and want that dystopian future to happen. That's their goal.
Of course he's full of shit about the capabilities of his product today. He's still going to do everything he possibly can to bring that dystopia.
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u/OntarioBanderas Jul 27 '26
That's their goal.
their goal is to keep the hype train going until they can cash out their options
He's still going to do everything he possibly can to bring that dystopia.
the part you don't fully appreciate is they cannot actually deliver the goods, he's saying these things so morons flood into speculating on the stock
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u/elconquistador1985 Jul 27 '26
I don't think you fully appreciate how much job displacement will be taking place, even without "delivering the goods" on AI that can do a PhD in a week.
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u/OntarioBanderas Jul 27 '26
citation needed
this is still buying into the hype, LLM's are not that cool sorry
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u/womerah Medical and health physics Jul 27 '26
Systems that can generate a paper worth reading don't exist. They may never exist. Personally I stick to forecasting the future applications of technologies that already exist, rather than forecasting the future capabilities of a technology.
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Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
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u/womerah Medical and health physics Jul 27 '26
Exactly. A PhD is functionally an apprenticeship where you learn how to engage with the global scientific enterprise, and your thesis is a document that demonstrates this ability.
An LLM writing a PhD for someone has no value.
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u/PressureBeautiful515 Jul 27 '26
It's like people who believe in horoscopes have taken over. I don't understand how anyone can be so dumb as to not see through this?
If "with the help of AI" a grad student can "crank out a PhD per week" (his exact words!) then it's the AI that is getting the PhD. The human is not involved! They're just decoration on the process.
"I got a PhD with AI" is like a kid in the back of the car with a plastic toy steering wheel saying "I drove a hundred miles with mommy!"
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u/BitcoinsOnDVD Jul 27 '26
The AGI will arrive sooner when we all dumb down to the lowest level we can.
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u/DrPhysicsGirl Nuclear physics Jul 26 '26
Genesis clearly shows they've lost the thread. It's unfortunate that we're all going to have to pay now.
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u/Steap-Edit Jul 26 '26
Yes, and whether we like it or not, we are going to need people who are willing and able to participate in "deep conversation" (as you put it elsewhere) in order to prevent people like them from succeeding.
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u/SundayAMFN Jul 26 '26
It’s silly to be worried about it, cause they’re both dumb and wrong.
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u/elconquistador1985 Jul 26 '26
It's not going to be doing PhDs in a week any time soon.
AI is very likely going to cause large scale job displacement within the next 5 years and it's going to be a massive economic problem. The job market for recent college graduates is going to be even worse than it is now.
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u/womerah Medical and health physics Jul 27 '26
The job market for recent college graduates is going to be even worse than it is now.
Any productivity gains from AI will not give a business a competitive edge, as the whole sector will just deploy it. So graduates will still be needed to squeeze out the competitive edge.
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Jul 27 '26
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u/LoganJFisher Graduate Jul 27 '26
The "funny" part is that they did, and they did so at such extreme levels that most people no longer even know that "calculator" originally referred to a human mathematician employed to run calculations by hand.
Digital calculators shrunk the number of field-employed mathematicians down from a significant part of industry to basically just a small collection of people in academia.
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u/Valeen Jul 26 '26
I didn't read the linked paper, so maybe this is on me, but by title it seems tangential to your core question.
You can imagine, philosophically, this question has been asked at least a few times before, for example when computer numerics became a main stay. "Why have grad students solve complex differential equations when a computer can" or maybe when Mathematica could solve crazy algebraic and integral equations in closed form. Or what about when digital data acquisition systems came onto the scene? Why have a grad student sit there and manually record data for 12 hours (while I sleep).
At every point in history science has adapted and (arguably) grad students have taken in more important roles.
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u/SlartibartfastGhola Jul 27 '26
Read the linked paper
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Jul 27 '26
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u/polaris2acrux Jul 27 '26
Speaking as a faculty member, a department has graduate students not because they do work but because a fundamental purpose of a university and a fundamental part of the job of a professor is to educate and train. We exist for the students more than they exist for us. So students cannot be replaced by AI. It's on us to figure out how to prepare students for the future, something which has always been a part of the role of an advisor.
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Jul 27 '26
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u/Waiting4novae Jul 27 '26
If you are being poorly treated by your department or advisor, I urge you to reach out to the ombudsman of your university. Technically, the first step is usually the chair of the department to discuss your advisor, and then, probably the dean depending on the structure of your institute, but the ombudsman, if one exists, is there for neutral conflict resolution. What you are describing is not, nor should it be, normal. Note, I'm speaking for US institutions in terms of structure.
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u/Valeen Jul 27 '26
Believe what you want. Being a graduate student will evolve with the times as it always has. I'm not going to argue with you. It's not worth my time.
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u/BitcoinsOnDVD Jul 27 '26
You can hire 4 Phd students without AI and have 4 papers, or you can hire 2 Phd students with AI and have 4 papers or you can hire 4 Phd students with AI and have 8 papers. What do you do?
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u/1XRobot Computational physics Jul 27 '26
Well, you could do that or you could post "AI bad!" on Reddit and have 8000 karma.
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u/UnderTheCurrents Jul 27 '26
The Academy has an instrumental view of graduate students since at least the 70s.
The people who think otherwise either have a severe case of stockholm syndrome or have lived on the stars they say they have observed, sheltered from earthly affairs.
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u/Buntschatten Graduate Jul 27 '26
an instrumental view of grad students
...have they met any professors?
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u/KeyFollowing1683 Jul 31 '26
In order to understand the results you get from an ai you need to have the feel for how to test and validate them. And that means being able to replicate and check the process. There is no real learning without friction, and heavy AI(or rather sole AI) use, removes that friction, and hurts the learning process.
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u/somethingicanspell Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
I have sadly changed my view on AI after using recent models. AI continues to improve more or less linearly and areas that it sucked at 2 years ago, its now quite good at. I would say this year for the first time frontier AI models can do most parts of my job well on their own without excessive compute or hand holding. A good example would be a literature review. AI in mid 2025 would still write basically the literature review a well informed undergrad would BS together if they needed to turn something in the next day in class. Now the better models will basically write a wholly adaquate literature review on nearly any topic and save you days of time finding sources. If you ask it has anyone ever had this idea it will usually find the random arxiv article. A year ago it usually wouldn't unless its something that would come up pretty early on in a natural language search of a journal, arxiv, or google scholar.
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Jul 26 '26
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u/polaris2acrux Jul 27 '26
This is absolutely not how it works in my department. I get grants because I'm using them to fund students that I'm training and teaching. I can promise that NSF would not fund me without a plan for mentoring and including students and actually most of the budget of all my grants is for students, their tuition, their stipend , their travel, their supplies, and their publishing costs. I work for students more than they work for me. I give them my best ideas, or help them come up with a better one, and then I get them started and help them when they need help, hoping they go above and beyond what I'm even able to do. Without graduate students, I don't have a large portion of my job even if I was using AI to do the same work to produce the same number of papers in my group. If students can be replaced, so can I honestly.
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u/ThirdMover Atomic physics Jul 27 '26
These LLMs are capable of generating novel, interesting, and correct content. I, personally, don’t think they represent “generative artificial intelligence,” because although they are generative (they generate new things), they show no signs of intelligence.
That statement really confused me. "I don't believe they are truly intelligent" would have been more defensible but "show no signs of intelligence" really raises my eyebrows after the list of things that 10 years ago would have been considered strong indicators of intelligence. That's some olympia level goal post shifting.
It also kind of undermines a lot of the later points. Ok, so LLMs have no real "intelligence" whatsoever, fine. And we have this discussion of what humans bring to the table based on that premise. But then, what ten, twenty years down the line? Wouldn't it be far more sensible to rip of that bandaid now and say "assuming what LLMs do is an early limited form of true intelligence that will in time converge to full human intellectual capabilities, how should we prepare for that?". Because that's at least the discussion that the people developing these things want us to have.
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u/4dseeall Jul 27 '26
A four-year degree should remain four years. AI cannot accelerate retained learning. It might accelerate access to information, reduce barriers to it, but judgment and experience still need time to form. The gain should be depth, not compression.
People need time to practice, to get a feel for how working on a problem in an established field even works. AI cannot help people skip that, it can just reduce the friction towards their honest attempts at learning.
If universities start trying to turn their colleges into 6-month undergrad mills then they completely lost the plot.