A string theory problem stuck for half a year, Claude solved it overnight!
Netizens exclaim: Humanity is entering a whole new era of science.
Fable 5 left a deep impression on Yuji Tachikawa, a professor at the University of Tokyo researching quantum field theory and string theory:
It seems Fable really does understand string theory, and also has intuition.
The tweet went viral overnight, author urgently deleted it and explained:
I deleted that tweet because it spread in unexpected ways too widely.
This is a heavy blow to AI skepticism: In the face of facts, who still thinks AI cannot or will not make scientific discoveries?
Who can imagine where AI will be in 5 years?
Physics Professor Stuck for Half a Year, Claude Solved 'String Theory' Problem Overnight
For half a year, research made no progress.
On the evening of July 12th, Yuji Tachikawa, a mathematical physicist at the University of Tokyo, suddenly had an impulse and threw this research note, stagnant for half a year, to an AI, without holding much hope.
But the AI proposed a very valuable insight, helping him solve this six-month-long problem.
What surprised him even more was that the AI then went on to call SymPy to write code and verify its own prediction results.
Yuji Tachikawa's assessment was: It seems to truly understand String Theory, and has intuition.
Previously, he asked Claude Fable to calculate the BN invariants under the map from TMF to KO.
Fable correctly completed it and generated a PDF proof.
Portal: https://member.ipmu.jp/yuji.tachikawa/tmp/product-BN.pdf
He evaluated it as 'Fable 5 knows algebraic topology better than I do,' and asked, 'Has it reached the level of a master's student in the field?'
This is high praise, considering Yuji Tachikawa's recent interest is 'geometric and algebraic structures related to supersymmetric quantum field theory.'
Humanity Steps into a New Scientific Era
Recently, the AI science circle has been quite lively.
In June, Anthropic released the preview of Claude Science, specifically designed to accelerate scientific research.
While Yuji Tachikawa was using Fable 5 to help solve his string theory problem, Euan Ashley, a geneticist and cardiologist at Stanford University, asked Claude to interpret his own genome. The AI finished in 30 minutes.
Back in 2010, Ashley led a 31-person team to complete the world's first clinical interpretation of a human genome, which took 9 months.
This time, upon returning from vacation, while unpacking, he had Claude analyze his own genome using the same standards.
In 30 minutes, the AI correctly identified an Alzheimer's disease risk allele, as well as several gene variants affecting drug metabolism.
The entire process used only about 180 words of prompts, consumed roughly 400,000 tokens, costing about $5 (estimated by Claude).
And for most of the time, Claude was idle, paused via waiting for connection to the NCBI server.
Finally, Ashley left with a thought: By any measure, this is absolutely astonishing.
One is in theoretical physics, the other in clinical genomics. AI has crossed the line between tool and colleague.
Under the tide of AI, science will erupt in unpredictable ways.
References:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02091-6
https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/2076658442282934351
https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1uv399n/yuji_tachikawa_one_of_the_worlds_leading/
This article is from the WeChat public account "AI Era Insight", author: ASI启示录
