All right, so this is going to be a different kind of video. I'm not running scripted. It's going to be kind of off the cuff. OpenAI just dropped this press release about how it, quote, "Derived a new result in theoretical physics." And I'm sure it's going to end up being all over the papers and everybody's going to talk about how it created new laws or any of that kind of crap. I happen to have had a physics degree many years ago from Texas A&M - insert Aggie joke here - and I happen to know enough about AI to kind of understand how the computing part of this might work, and I'm willing to put my thumb in Sam Altman's eye - figuratively speaking, of course. So I figured I would take a minute to try to head this off and put together a quick video to help you understand what the heck they're talking about. Okay. So here's this, this press release they put out, I'll put all the URLs down in the bottom.

"Some physical observables calculated using textbook methods look terribly complicated, but turn out to be very simple. Finding a simple formula is always been fiddly and also something that I have long felt might be automatable by computers." So here's what we're actually talking about, right? If you look at the actual paper that they generated, you'll see that OpenAI is mentioned here, and it's mentioned here, and it's mentioned in the acknowledgments. So it's not like OpenAI was doing all of this stuff. What happened as near as I can tell was human authors worked out the amplitudes for longer equations by hand, getting a very complicated expression, right? And then they gave that expression to GPT 5.2, GPT 5.2 Pro, and it grinded for 12 hours and then came up with a simplified version of it. This is the kind of thing you probably could have gotten Mathematica to do if you're willing to spend the money on all the API calls that would have taken to grind through all this stuff. But basically what happened, and you don't need to understand any of this stuff, right? So you've got all this stuff here, and then you've got all this stuff here and down here. And what happened was - let me change colors - that OpenAI, ChatGPT 5.2, took all of that stuff and ground on it and found that this particular equation was a simplified version of all of the equations that I've got there in yellow and some on the previous page. So it's basically just a finding the generic form of a bunch of different equations that people had already worked out, and you can do that basically with brute force. I'm not saying it's easy, and I'm not saying this isn't a cool result, but this is not a result in physics that only an AI could have come up with. This is just a thing that spent a lot of time doing brute force on math until it found an equation that was a simplified version of a bunch of other equations that it had. That's really all it is.

And I'm happy that AI can simplify equations. I'm happy that physicists can turn to computers. They have been for decades now. But I'm happy that AI is a new tool that physicists can use to make the math simpler, and then they can use that simplified math to try to go and look at other things. I mean, it's good that OpenAI can do this, but my guess based on looking at this, especially up here at the top where it says this was on behalf of OpenAI, my guess is one way this could have happened is the OpenAI folks could have gone around a bunch of universities, found somebody who knew of some equations that would be cool to simplify or that they thought might have a simplified form, asked people to give them the longer versions of those equations, took those, fed it into the AI, got a simplified version out, gave it back to the physicists, the physicists did something with it, and then OpenAI is basically in this press release trying to claim the credit for it. The "ChatGPT 5.2 derives a new result for the theoretical physics." So "derive" is a mathematical term for "turned one equation into another", basically. This is not like Newton's fourth law or something, right? This is just somebody took some complicated math, fed it into the AI and the AI come back with a simplified version of it. People could have done that. It just would have taken a lot of time and effort, and I'm glad that the AI can make that faster, but this is, I'm sure this is going to be presented as the AI figured out a lot of physics at the people that only AI could have figured out or that humans weren't capable of that kind of stuff. It just simplified some math, and it's good that it simplified some math, but I'm sure it's going to get blown way out of proportion because this headline sounds a lot more grandiose than what the actual reality actually is, and then some idiots out there are going to take this headline, and they're going to not understand what any of the other stuff is, and they're just going to run with this headline, and I don't even want to know how bad the headlines of the articles or the videos that people write based on this headline are going to be. I'm sure we're going to hear that, and it's going to get combined with Sam Altman's bit about how "ChatGPT is supposedly a PhD in every subject" garbage, and oh, by the way, there's a bit in this paper where it talks about a "new internal OpenAI model." So as near as I can tell, OpenAI built a special model to do part of this, which is fine, and it's great, and I'm sure it cost them a lot of money, but it's not like we're talking about ChatGPT being a PhD physicist and coming up with stuff that physicists weren't capable of doing. This is not "chatbot discovered as a fundamental force of the universe" or something like that. Despite the headlines, you're probably going to see in the next few days, so I figured I would just say this real quick, get this out there before all the headlines happen, hopefully somebody, when they see the headlines, point to a video like this, or hopefully some other people will say things about it. Thanks for watching. Sorry, this wasn't very organized. I was setting up to record another video, and I saw this press release come out. It was like, "all right, I'll just go ahead and record something quick about it." I haven't taken my normal time to vet and research and make a script and edit it several times and all that kind of stuff. This is all just unscripted off the cuff, but when I saw that press release came out, I thought, "you know, I ought to get something out there since I can, and hopefully some people will see it and not everybody will be fooled by whatever the headlines are going to be." Thanks for watching. Let's be careful out there.