David Turturean, a recent MIT graduate and a member of the technical staff at the startup lab Physical Superintelligence (PSI), used early access to Anthropic’s Fable 5.2 model to solve an eighteen-year-old problem about quantum computing. Scott Aaronson, one of the two researchers who posed the problem, writes that he doesn’t quite understand the proof, but that he believes it’s correct because it was autoformalized in Lean, a coding language for math, and explained by a team of top researchers with whom PSI shared the solution. The solution appears to close the door on one avenue quantum computers could follow to solve certain difficult problems at high speed, but not all of them.
More broadly, it reflects the upheaval in the scientific world caused by AI problem-solving. Surely they tried it, so was it really so much harder than all the problems that were solved?” That’s a point in favor of PSI’s model, which is to solve scientific problems with specialized model harnesses and scaffolding. Like, ‘no, no, no, trust me, pretty soon, theoretical physics is going to be mostly the domain of machines,’” Pines said.
Last week, the start-up Discovered Materials released a $1 million grand challenge for researchers using AI to understand problems like superconductivity and heat dissipation. He said the startup is focused on understanding how to take computational results and validate them with experiments in the most efficient way possible. The AI suggests an idea; it allows you to do something in the world you weren’t able to do before….and so each of those are kind of loops that PSI is building.” As “neolabs for science” become a pathway for potentially groundbreaking science, the participants are still figuring out what the standards are for this new world.
Because PSI had to hold its result until Anthropic’s model was nearly ready for release, they were able to share it with relevant researchers to better understand it. He’ll be attending a summit at MIT next week where leading physicists will try to hash out a response to the new pace of science.
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