This professor says AI will never feel shivers down its spine. AI systems can now automatically discover fundamental symmetries and new physical laws without being taught the underlying theories. Essentially, they're finding the hidden mathematical patterns that govern our universe through pure data analysis. If machines could independently discover new laws like Lorentz invariance from particle physics data without knowing Einstein's theories, it suggests AI might find entirely new physical principles we've never, ever conceived of. Primarily, Professor Rose U's team trained deep learning models on data from the Large Hadron Collider that automatically recognized symmetry patterns and high energy particle interactions, the same symmetries that took Einstein and other geniuses decades to understand through pure theoretical insight. Professor Rose U is a computational physicist at UC San Diego whose AI models have been deployed by Google Maps for traffic predictions and ranked number one among 40 national teams for pandemic forecasting during COVID 19. Now let's meet this brilliant natural genius who's taking artificial intelligence to the next level. Let's go.

Professor Rose Yu, so nice to have you here at UCSD's Arthur C. Clarke center for Human Imaginations into the Impossible podcast. Great to meet you.

It's a pleasure to be here.

You've done so much wonderful stuff, and it's wonderful and gratifying to know that you're a colleague here at ucsd, but you're also getting the recognition that you deserve. I want to start off with a little bit of a provocative question, which is fascinating to me, which is the following question. Can an AI physicist ever do. Do what Albert Einstein did? So famously in 1907, Albert Einstein said he had a dream, a thought experiment, that if he was in freefall, like, if he was like this and he fell down, that he would feel no gravitational force field, so you could actually get rid of gravity. And that's part of what's called the Einstein Equivalence Principle. I want to ask you. He called that notion, that thought the happiest thought that he ever had. He said it made shivers go down his spine.

Can an artificial intelligence ever have a happy thought? Can it ever feel shivers down its spine or its CPU or gpu? And can it really create new laws of physics?

That's a good question. So I think in general, AI is a bunch of machines that can think. So if you ask whether these machines can have emotions, I'll say most likely no, just by how they're constructed. I don't know whether it's possible even to build machines that have emotions. However, the second question is whether these machines can create. And I Think my answer is definitely yes because these models are built with a lot of data and they're distilled with the worst knowledge. And then once they are imbued with this knowledge, they can start to create new content. And you're already seeing these examples now with new large language models, they create new mathematics theorems.

They can also generate new hypotheses. Recently they have shown these models can create new molecules. So as we are seeing more and more examples, it just vindicate that it's definitely possible for these models to create new theories like what Einstein has come up with.

Obviously everyone out there is familiar with LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude. I use them all, I pay for them all. There's probably a bunch I'm paying for that I don't even know about. I'm just. My credit card gets deduct abducted. I use them for everything. They read my kids bedtime story originally I was kind of embarrassed and I was ashamed. I'm using a AI to read a bedtime story or come up with a bedtime story and then it reads to them.

But I mean a book is kind of like that. It's just a natural intelligence and I'm just reading or listening to an audiobook. So I've gotten over my, my guilt on that. But there seems to be something different about physics and that's the only reason I'll bring that up is because that's what I do, I'm a physicist and that it's an empirical science. Mathematics I could understand and I might have predicted that you could make new mathematical theorems and test things because proof is possible in mathematics, but it's not possible in physics. I can't prove the earth is round, you know, for example, it's not possible to prove that statement. You can exclude and falsify other statements. When I think about LLMs, I think about, you know, these original devices that were made on GPU systems so you can talk about the computer architecture later on.

But as I understand it, you know, the GPUs were invented to you know, make Grand Theft Auto 6 and Minecraft and run really fast and optimize for, you know, my, my kids to, you know, kill their friends at one millisecond before their, their, their friends kill them on the game. They weren't designed for certainly for AI, they just turned out that they were good for it. Why are GPUs so good for it? Good for AI and are they good for non LLM type AI systems?