Episode Details

Some people are going crazy over GPT 5.5. Some people. This is the story of the Jagged Frontier. People who use AI to write emails or even code implementation work find the lift moderate whereas people pushing the limits of the model are figuring out that the limits just moved outwards.

Alex Lupsaska has been tracking this limit for a year and a half now. “When GPT5 came out, it was able to reproduce one of my best papers (that took a very long time to come up with) in 30 minutes.”

But Alex also notes that this shift was mostly invisible.

I remember when GPT-5 came out… on Twitter, the reception was lukewarm. A lot of people were like, well, we expected a lot more, and it’s not better at writing email. And I remember thinking, well, okay, GPT-3 could write email. How much better can it get at writing email? That’s not the point. But at the science frontier, the capabilities were really taking off.

We walk through his paper and more with him in today’s Science pod! Watch here.

The “Oscar for physics”

Alex made an early splash in his career with breakthroughs in our understanding of black holes. He’s also known for Black Hole Explorer and an iPhone app that makes visualizing black holes fun and interactive to regular audiences. Alex won the 2024 New Horizons in Fundamental Physics Breakthrough Prize. Known as the “Oscar for physics” this is arguably the most prestigious prize an early stage theoretical physicist can win.

Alex first saw promise for AI in theoretical physics after he asked o3 for help on his research. In the podcast, Alex recalls asking GPT for help with a calculation that would have taken days, and getting a result in eleven minutes.

He immediately recognized how impactful AI would be for his work even as though his physicist colleagues and the larger community gave it a lukewarm or skeptical reception.

The Move 37 Moment for AI x Physics

GPT-5 had just been released, and Alex tried asking it to solve a problem in a just published paper. GPT-5 said no answer. But Mark Chen, CRO of OpenAI, pushed a bit harder, and had Alex prime the model with a textbook warmup problem, which it easily solved. After using this “priming” trick, GPT-5 was able to reproduce his full result in eleven minutes (yes, the paper was released after the model’s training cutoff).

“This changes everything.” Alex notes that we seem to be on the edge of a massive change in theoretical physics reasoning. A year prior LLMs were just starting do correct math. Now ChatGPT could reproduce his hardest paper in the time it takes to get a coffee.

Alex was on sabbatical at Vanderbilt, and he joined OpenAI to start pushing the boundary of AI’s ability to accelerate physics.

“AI solved the problem before the plane landed”

Alex began to put GPT through it’s paces, reaching out to colleagues for problems they were stuck on. His old PhD advisor (Prof. Andrew Storminger at Harvard) had an insidght about certain physical quantities known