Man, when I was doing my PhD at CERN the most far out thing that we were generally allowed to use was boosted decision trees :) getting anything other than that approved for any Higgs-related analysis was… not a thing.
Using neural nets for signal background separation was pretty standard in ~2012 when the Higgs discovery was published. Was also pretty standard for CDF + DZero papers that came out before the LHC turned on.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1207.7214 - The original ATLAS Higgs discovery paper uses neural nets to identify photons. It also uses a neural net b-tagger to improve the H->WW signal to noise ratio.
Finally! As a SWE, I was getting worried scientists would be left out of the increasingly-worried-about-getting-replaced club that SWEs and mathematicians are currently enjoying being members of.
I’d be surprised if that isn’t already the case with CERN itself already being a multi-national collaboration project and with things like GÉANT https://geant.org/ existing
I'm not at all anti-AI, but I'm still holding my breath to see real scientific contributions coming from modern (LLM/CoT/agent) AI. Much of the premise behind "AI will make superabundance a reality" hinges on getting AI-driven science that affects everyday lives Anthropic's quasi-CRISPR-like discovery did not seem super compelling, and that is still the best I have seen. If anyone has more heartening stories that could convince me to be an optimist, please do share ;)
What I think the parent post is missing is that breakthroughs in science don't immediately translate into breakthroughs in engineering and even less so into economically viable products.
The distinction for many people is that math and cs feel like very natural domains for LLMs (and importantly, domains that enable quick iteration and verification). Much less applicable with eg biology and other fields that require lots of physical experimentation.
(in)Conveniently those are also the fields where most ordinary people would experience the most effects from accelerated progress. Dario famously promises potential cures for cancer and dementia.
I think there's a pretty clear distinction between math and science. The former builds theoretical models of what certain axioms and assumptions imply. The latter builds actual models of what we see and measure in the real world.
Advances in math will probably result in advances in science, which in turn will result in advances in engineering (which is probably where the average person sees an actual benefit in their day to day life). But it's not automatic and a lot of the hand wringing by mathematicians about the AI math results include "is this (AI) method of finding proofs actually going to result in as many of those downstream advances as the old fashioned way?"
(I include theoretical CS as a subfield of math - and believe the S in it is a misnomer).
I have a feeling that many more fields are utilizing AI and having some success with it and we just don't know about it in our STEM bubble.
On the other hand, you could downplay the math findings a bit, since it didn't further our understanding of mathematics just yet, only provided proves to things we didn't have proves for.
If you are limiting yourself to modern whatever, you are not going to find that a lot of science that affects everyday lives. Between the first results and practical applications, it can take many years. There is a reason Nobel prize winners tend to be old.
Less modern AI (aka. machine learning) is used all the time in science. I don't know of any commercial breakthrough yet, but there are some promising developments, like in antibiotics. If it materializes, that would be a very big deal.
I think maths is really the only solid case so far. I do wonder whether the big early contribution to experimental science will be in speeding up the scientists conducting it, at least until some non-negligible boundary in simulation fidelity is crossed.
Saw a post recently about how AI agents were used to check if papers had flaws in their conclusions and it found 15% did, that kind of auditing is already a massive massive advancement for science
AI has an incredibly long history of contributing to science and engineering. Some highlights:
Gerard t' Hoofd (under Martinus Veldman) proved in 1971 that Yang-Mills gauge theories are renormalizable, using a rule-based AI (LISP-styled but manually written in assembly) called "Schoonschip" (I'm guessing called that because there were several failed attempts that went before and failed). This program was an AI in the sense of a search algorithm searching symbolic proofs. It got the 1999 Nobel prize in Physics.
This was hugely important because first, it showed that it was possible to make the Standard Model of physics and it also helped beyond that by showing for a lot of (at that point considered) impossible theories exactly how to make them work (meaning not just a proof that it could be done, but a long list of "if you have problem X, do Y" recipes). One of these became first the "electroweak unification", then the standard model.
Hao Wang proved that the logic of "Principia Mathematica" was actually correct using another symbolic proof generator. His efforts were also the start of many other such programs that contributed lots of stuff to mathematics that nobody sane was ever going to do, such as finding all the higher-order versions of the quadratic formula (there's a lot of them).
At Stanford university, tens of thousands of molecules were found in 1965 by having an AI, this one was what's called an "expert system", evaluate mass spectroscopy data and combine it with chemistry knowledge in the form of rules about what was possible or not possible and if only one option remained, spit it out. It almost doubled the sum total of our chemistry knowledge if counted by known molecular structures. It was later adapted to make mass spectroscopy useful in finding the composition of samples.
Then there's Alphafold, first a ConvNet (Resnet+Convnet to be exact), then switched to the transformer architecture, which gave use the folding of just about every protein we have ever found, and even more proteins that we've never even found. Nobel prize in Chemistry 2024.
There’s been a tendency since well before LLMs for AI demos to focus on “here’s a new problem we made up that it solves that you could imagine will soon transfer to an existing real problem” as opposed to “AI solves X”. This has been an ongoing challenge, it does cool stuff and looks so promising but has been very hard to harness for useful work. It’s still going to take time before the hype dies down and we see what’s left.
I don’t think it’s going away, LLMs and other ML stuff will no doubt remain part of people’s workflow, but I also see no evidence for superabundance or anything close to it.
It makes sense in a political way but I'm not sure if it's the best choice for scientific development seeing as Mistral has been pretty behind the curve it's entire existence.
It makes more sense if they're the only company who was willing to work on a more custom solution for the proposed LHC model but I don't that a bit as it would be great PR for the frontier labs.
This seems a lot more like an effort to bolster European AI by moving CERN money into Mistral.
I think there is a large group of commenters who actually just hate silicon valley tech companies, and they're fine with AI as long as it comes from someone else.
AI has been beneficial in multiple research fields across maths and science. That is to say, it's actually benefited humanity in those particular use cases.
As opposed to enshitifying the lives of the working class in most other areas.
Using AI as a tool to investigate the mysteries of the universe is a huge win for humanity. Generating slop images to confuse people online is not. AI is tool, we like when tools are used for good.
Maturity is understanding there's an enormous range between "like" and "dislike", between "love" and "hate", between "good" and "bad", and its also possible to be neither at once or both at once.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1207.7214 - The original ATLAS Higgs discovery paper uses neural nets to identify photons. It also uses a neural net b-tagger to improve the H->WW signal to noise ratio.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1303.0763 - used neural nets extra tt+jets noise https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.05066 - used neural nets for signal/background separation.
Um, I believe I have linked you to "actual analysis" where techniques used are more exotic than boosted decision trees.
What I think the parent post is missing is that breakthroughs in science don't immediately translate into breakthroughs in engineering and even less so into economically viable products.
(in)Conveniently those are also the fields where most ordinary people would experience the most effects from accelerated progress. Dario famously promises potential cures for cancer and dementia.
Advances in math will probably result in advances in science, which in turn will result in advances in engineering (which is probably where the average person sees an actual benefit in their day to day life). But it's not automatic and a lot of the hand wringing by mathematicians about the AI math results include "is this (AI) method of finding proofs actually going to result in as many of those downstream advances as the old fashioned way?"
(I include theoretical CS as a subfield of math - and believe the S in it is a misnomer).
On the other hand, you could downplay the math findings a bit, since it didn't further our understanding of mathematics just yet, only provided proves to things we didn't have proves for.
Less modern AI (aka. machine learning) is used all the time in science. I don't know of any commercial breakthrough yet, but there are some promising developments, like in antibiotics. If it materializes, that would be a very big deal.
Gerard t' Hoofd (under Martinus Veldman) proved in 1971 that Yang-Mills gauge theories are renormalizable, using a rule-based AI (LISP-styled but manually written in assembly) called "Schoonschip" (I'm guessing called that because there were several failed attempts that went before and failed). This program was an AI in the sense of a search algorithm searching symbolic proofs. It got the 1999 Nobel prize in Physics.
This was hugely important because first, it showed that it was possible to make the Standard Model of physics and it also helped beyond that by showing for a lot of (at that point considered) impossible theories exactly how to make them work (meaning not just a proof that it could be done, but a long list of "if you have problem X, do Y" recipes). One of these became first the "electroweak unification", then the standard model.
Hao Wang proved that the logic of "Principia Mathematica" was actually correct using another symbolic proof generator. His efforts were also the start of many other such programs that contributed lots of stuff to mathematics that nobody sane was ever going to do, such as finding all the higher-order versions of the quadratic formula (there's a lot of them).
At Stanford university, tens of thousands of molecules were found in 1965 by having an AI, this one was what's called an "expert system", evaluate mass spectroscopy data and combine it with chemistry knowledge in the form of rules about what was possible or not possible and if only one option remained, spit it out. It almost doubled the sum total of our chemistry knowledge if counted by known molecular structures. It was later adapted to make mass spectroscopy useful in finding the composition of samples.
Then there's Alphafold, first a ConvNet (Resnet+Convnet to be exact), then switched to the transformer architecture, which gave use the folding of just about every protein we have ever found, and even more proteins that we've never even found. Nobel prize in Chemistry 2024.
I don’t think it’s going away, LLMs and other ML stuff will no doubt remain part of people’s workflow, but I also see no evidence for superabundance or anything close to it.
Makes perfect sense and I’m glad that CERN is focusing on EU providers
It makes more sense if they're the only company who was willing to work on a more custom solution for the proposed LHC model but I don't that a bit as it would be great PR for the frontier labs.
This seems a lot more like an effort to bolster European AI by moving CERN money into Mistral.
As opposed to enshitifying the lives of the working class in most other areas.