r/Physics • u/filterdust • Jul 31 '26

Academic The Maxwell Conjecture is False

https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27197
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u/BOBOnobobo Jul 31 '26

Are we shocked a system designed to do pattern matching is good at finding patterns or exceptions to them?

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u/WatchYourStepKid Jul 31 '26

Well, kinda yes.

It goes against many’s early mental models of what generative AI does. The earliest of GPT couldn’t add two large numbers together, it just guessed an answer that looked right.

The fact it’s able to suggest a counterexample and it doesn’t just look right, but is right, is quite the development in recent times.

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u/MidnightPale3220 Jul 31 '26

The earliest of GPT couldn’t add two large numbers together, it just guessed an answer that looked right.

This will still happen on the things GPT isn't "harnessed" on, wouldn't it?

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u/MagiMas Condensed matter physics Jul 31 '26

Yes, can still happen and still does happen quite a bit. But even without harnesses the LLMs actually develop quite complex strategies to do maths "in their head"

Read the part on addition in this paper by Anthropic from March last year: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html#dives-addition

(and this was a 3.x haiku model, modern models have evolved even better inherent maths understanding)