Seeing what AI has been doing to maths conjectures recently, I decided to give theoretical physics a go.

I threw some random "crank" ideas into GPT 5.6 Ultra and let it consume most of my weekly Pro subscription quota.

I'm actually pretty impressed with what can be achieved! If your simply ask it to use adversarial agents and include honest self-ratings, it can produce output competitive with a smart but not exceptional PhD. Not imaginative, but the effort that it sinks into even the smallest matters is just amazing to watch.

Did I get anywhere by applying AI to my toy models? Probably not! I ran out of quota before I could tackle anything really interesting.

But... GPT did seem to discover something genuinely new by essentially brute-force effort of combing through hundreds of papers on ArXiV: a new "constant" extracted from a formula over quark masses that seems to evaluate to exactly 3/4 at the one-loop level and then with various corrections at two-loop and higher. Link: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6a80f2c794388191971350733a6f4378

This is "novel" in the sense that it found a vaguely similar formula in a paper where the authors simply missed the opportunity to extract a simple ratio from quark masses, combined with updated constants the AI found in in later papers that allowed it to guess that this might be exactly 3/4.

This is the super-power of mechanised attention!

We've produced a truly ludicrous amount of scientific and mathematical output, far past the ability of any single human mind to be even vaguely aware of all of it.

Now we can scrape together all of the jigsaw pieces we have made and see what fits together.

I wouldn't be surprised if someone, perhaps even a hobbyist comes up with a viable theory-of-everything in the next year or two simply by feeding in some clever starting point and then turning the handle on the machine until a complete and consistent theory pops out the other side.

Exciting times!