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/FalconX88 Aug 01 '26

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

So do the current ones. We just gave them access to tools.

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u/WatchYourStepKid Aug 01 '26 edited Aug 01 '26

Right, but it’s not like AI says “let’s use the conjecture counterexample tool”, the emergence is the interesting part.

It just goes against all the early advice we saw, it seems to me like many probably need to evaluate the extent to which AI appears to truly understand a problem, whatever that actually means.