🔬Doing Vibe Physics — Alex Lupsasca, OpenAI

**Alex Lupsasca** (0:00)
Okay, so I think we're at the special time now, where at least in some directions, AI has become superhuman, at least on certain tasks. And that's what led to these recent papers that resolve a problem that was puzzling physicists, experts in the field for over a year, and they weren't able to resolve it, and AI was able to do it very quickly.
So I think that's a certain milestone that we've passed, but you guys are bringing attention to this because I think maybe for the average person on the street who doesn't care about theoretical physics, this is not very noticeable, but I think it's a very profound change, and we've really passed some kind of a threshold.

**Brandon** (0:40)
Welcome to the AI for Science Podcast, part of Lean Space Network. I'm Brandon. I develop RNA therapeutics using AI at Atomic AI.
I'm joined by my co-host, RJ. Honecky, CTO and founder of Mirroromics.
Yeah, it's a pleasure to introduce Alex Lupsaska, professor at Vanderbilt University and fellow at OpenAI. He has, for a young researcher, he has quite a storied background. Amongst other things, he's the winner of the 2024 New Horizons Breakthrough Prize. It's called the Oscars for Science. I asked ChatGPT, is this the most prestigious award someone of his career could win, and it recommended a second one called the IUPAP Award, which turns out he had also won. Anyway, right now, he's having fun at OpenAI, doing some really cool research of pushing the foundation of theoretical physics using GPT models.

**Alex Lupsasca** (1:38)
A pleasure to be here.
The one message I wanted to convey is that I think we're on this trajectory, which I personally find very surprising and kind of surreal, but also amazing, where I would say a little over a year ago, AI was very useful for email, but not the kind of work that I do that I consider important theoretical physics calculations. I thought, oh, that's special, much harder than email and AI is not going to be able to do that.
Then there were a series of developments that came in rapid succession, that completely changed my mind, and I can walk you through some of these examples. Specifically, in particular, ChatGPT 3 was the first really strong reasoning model that could do actual math, that was useful for my research and could save me a lot of time. That's when I started to really pay attention and use it a lot more. And I thought, wow, this is a great tool. I get ahead of this and learn how to integrate it into my workflow. Then when GPT5 came out, it was able to reproduce one of my best papers that took me a very long time to come up with in like 30 minutes. And that's when I really became AI Pill. I thought, oh my god, this changes everything. It's the most important discovery in my lifetime. It's going to affect everything about how we do research. And frankly, a lot of my colleagues, I would go around telling them this currently.

**RJ Honecky** (2:57)
Pay attention.

**Alex Lupsasca** (2:59)
Yeah, I was getting lots of different reactions, but I think people weren't quite getting it. But I talked to OpenAI. They were also really excited. And I thought, I don't know that much about AI, but I have to get in on this. And to understand that this is happening and not be a part of it is a huge mistake. So I have to go to OpenAI. So I was on sabbatical. It was very easy to come here and join the company.
And then it just kept ramping up even beyond that. And to the point where now I think most of my senior colleagues in physics are aware of where things are ahead of and they're all getting on board. So yeah, I think that's an awesome story.

**Brandon** (3:42)
Sorry, I was going to say, I find it really funny that you, that story, because it reminds me of a lot of different people who had the same realization with Codex starting sometime last fall, especially. It just took off and a bunch of people are like, even like Andrej Karfati went from, oh man, this is 20% of my work. It's kind of a nice assistant to, oh crap, what just happened?

**Alex Lupsasca** (4:07)
Well, yeah, in August, actually, I remember when GPT-5 came out. At that point, I was really following AI pretty closely. And I think on Twitter, the reception was lukewarm. A lot of people were like, well, we expected a lot more, and it's not better to write an email. And I remember thinking, well, okay, GPT-3 could write an email.