Ellen Stiefler

I spent last night with Andrew Strominger and Alex Lupsasca, two of the top physicists in the world They just released a paper, co-authored with OpenAi, that seems to me like ASI Andrew, who helped develop string theory, told me that a year ago, his view was that he didn’t know how helpful AI was going to be. A year later, after some back and forth with GPT 5.2 pro, they submitted a final query to an internal model which solved AND proved a previously unsolved problem in quantum field theory…in 12 hours. A model, doing something two of the smartest people in the world in their field couldn’t do. And, when I was with them, they were giddy with excitement for what might lay ahead. Andy said “It is the first time I’ve seen AI solve a problem in my kind of theoretical physics that might not have been solvable by humans.” They said, “two things changed: the model improved and we figured out how to talk to it.” Andy also told me “I also now feel that with the recent advances, most physicists who want to keep up with the frontiers of progress will need to learn how to talk to it. That wasn’t true a year ago.” ASI is here, just not evenly distributed.