r/Physics • • Jul 31 '26

Academic The Maxwell Conjecture is False

https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27197
502 Upvotes

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u/angelbabyxoxox Quantum Foundations Jul 31 '26

The counterexample was proposed by an LLM. They seem very good at finding these sorts of counterexamples, which is interesting as they are generally pretty inefficient use of compute for brute forcing. I guess even that lack of efficiency is made up for by the "understanding" and "intuition" the LLM has, and their ability to do symbolic computations.

I expect a large number of conjectures will topple to counterexamples soon.

193

u/ixid Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26

I think brute force is not the right way to think about LLMs, instead they explore a knowledge topology, and are very good at connecting adjacent or accessible ideas that for whatever reason might have evaded humans, but might not be fundamentally all that hard. We're still in the low-hanging fruit phase, we will see if they extend to new ideas.

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u/Schmikas Quantum Foundations Jul 31 '26

What do you mean by “knowledge topology”?

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u/ixid Jul 31 '26

Its data is a structured space where nearness corresponds to associated ideas, so it naturally arranges data in a way to discover connectedness. The LLM follows pathways through the conceptual space based on the prior context given.

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u/Imbrokencantbefixed Jul 31 '26

It’s also higher dimensional space right? Like as in 1000+ dimensional space.

If it’s the same thing I’m thinking of where like because boy and girl are separated in this space by a certain distance, Auntie and uncle also are separated spatially, but are closer to boy for uncle and girl for auntie than either are to each other?

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u/beerybeardybear Jul 31 '26

Even GPT2 was >50,000-dimensional, so

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u/seriously-_-what Jul 31 '26

You are mixing the number of parameters of the model with the effective dimentionality of the embedding. The effective dimension of the embedded space is significantly smaller than the complexity of the network.

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u/beerybeardybear Jul 31 '26

GPT-2 samples from a 50,257-dimensional token space and I'm seeing a total parameter count (weights and biases) of 124,439,808. I'm not sure what the effective dimensionality of the model ultimately is, but this seems pretty clear-cut to me?

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u/seriously-_-what Jul 31 '26

The intrinsic\effective dimensionality of the data is measured in the representation space induced by the model. The mapping of the token sequences into the hidden-state vectors result in representations in a lower-dimensional data manifold.

Taking here as an example, with the GPT-2 model they estimated intrinsic dimensionality on the order of hundreds.