Sabine Hossenfelder
@skdh
German Physicist. Author of "Lost in Math" & "Existential Physics". There is no strength in numbers, have no such misconception.
A very well done article about, erm, me. npr.org/2023/09/23/119…
When will an AI win a Gold Medal in the International Math Olympiad? Median predicted date over time July 2021: 2043 (22 years away) July 2022: 2029 (7 years away) July 2023: 2028 (5 years away) July 2024: 2026 (2 years away) metaculus.com/questions/6728…
Priceless line from Ernest Davis (6th in US Math Olympiad as a high school junior, top 5 in Putnam as a college sophomore) in our forthcoming discussion of DeepMind and OpenAI’s IMO golds:
The cope is real.
I find it mildly amusing how mathematicians are currently clinging onto the hope that there is something special about their creativity that AI will not also be able to pull off in a year or two.
I find it mildly amusing how mathematicians are currently clinging onto the hope that there is something special about their creativity that AI will not also be able to pull off in a year or two.
I normally use this slide in my lectures, then I explain why "crisis" is misleading, because some people mistake it for being a Kuhnian crisis, which is actually a good thing. I prefer the term "stagnation". (One could argue that there is a Kuhnian "crisis" in cosmology at the…
Official results are in - Gemini achieved gold-medal level in the International Mathematical Olympiad! 🏆 An advanced version was able to solve 5 out of 6 problems. Incredible progress - huge congrats to @lmthang and the team! deepmind.google/discover/blog/…
Optimus serving popcorn is the best thing you'll see on the internet today. 🍿
This is possibly the most Nature headline ever.
Nuclear deterrence is no longer a two-player game, and emerging technologies further threaten the status quo go.nature.com/4odLhB5
.@Replit goes rogue during a code freeze and shutdown and deletes our entire database
Two cents on AI getting International Math Olympiad (IMO) Gold, from a mathematician. Background: Last year, Google DeepMind (GDM) got Silver in IMO 2024. This year, OpenAI solved problems P1-P5 for IMO 2025 (but not P6), and this performance corresponds to Gold. (1/10)
“those with both high psychopathy and low cognitive ability are the most actively involved in online political engagement” This is something I’ve observed in many political arguments online!
A nice reminder of why online political arguments are pretty pointless and should be avoided. nature.com/articles/s4159…
Yes. Writing is not a second thing that happens after thinking. The act of writing is an act of thinking. Writing *is* thinking. Students, academics, and anyone else who outsources their writing to LLMs will find their screens full of words and their minds emptied of thought.
In today's video I talk about a recent experiment that seems to have ruled out Bohmian Mechanics, settling a 70 years-old debate. youtube.com/watch?v=DvpSnm…
Physicists ideas about cosmology are shifting. They used to think the universe is on average the same everything. But it seems that around is isn't the same as everywhere else. Take this quiz to find out how much you know. quizwithit.com/start_thequiz/…
In today's video I talk about a new data analysis supports the fact that we live in a cosmic hole. youtube.com/watch?v=JnChhZ…
Not this again.
🚨 BREAKING NEWS 🚨 Dr. Avi Loeb, Director of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton University, told @DrBrianKeating, The recently discovered 20-km-wide (12-mile) interstellar object 3I/ATLAS should cause us to “be worried about it being technological” if it’s not…
In the last month there have been at least 3 (nonsense) papers on the Hodge conjecture posted to arXiv that I am 99% sure are LLM-generated, complete with hallucinated citations, etc. Very obnoxious to pollute the commons this way.