AI Is Now Physics. Here's the Historical Proof.

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Is AI physics? There was a Nobel Prize awarded for that, but what are your views?

[00:00:05]I believe that artificial intelligence has gone from being not physics to being physics, actually.

[00:00:12]Uh you know, one of the best ways to insult a physicist is to tell them that their work isn't physics, as if somehow there's a generally agreed on boundary between what's physics and what's not, or between what's science and what's not, but I find like the the most obvious lesson we get if we just look at the history of science is that the boundary has evolved. Some things that used to be considered scientific by some, like astrology, has left the boundaries contracted, so that's not considered science now.

[00:00:42]And then a lot of other things that were pooh-poohed as being non-scientific are now considered obviously science, like I sometimes teach the electromagnetism course, and and I remind my students that when Michael Faraday first proposed the idea of the electromagnetic field, people were like, "What are you talking about? You're saying there's some stuff that exists, but you can't see it, you can't touch it. That sounds like ghosts, like total non-scientific you know." And they really gave him a hard time for that. And the irony is not only is that considered part of of physics now, but you can see the electromagnetic field. It's in fact the only thing we can see, cuz light is electromagnetic wave. And and after that, things like black holes, things like atoms, which Max Planck famously said is not physics, you know, even talk about what our universe was doing 13.8 billion years ago, have become considered part of physics.

[00:01:39]And I think AI is now going the same way. I think that's part of the reason that um Jeff Hinton got the Nobel Prize in physics, cuz what is physics? If to me, physics is is all about looking at some complex, interesting system, doing something, and trying to figure out how it works.

[00:01:58]We started on things like the solar system and atoms. But if you look at the an artificial neural network that can translate French into Japanese, you know, that's pretty impressive, too.

[00:02:10]And there's this whole field that um has started blossoming now that I also had a lot of fun working in called mechanistic interpretability, where you study an intelligent artificial system try to ask these basic questions like, "Well, how does it work? Are there some equations that describe it? Are there some basic mechanisms?" and so on.