The tools of artificial intelligence — neural networks in particular — have been good to physicists. For years, this technology has helped researchers reconstruct particle trajectories in accelerator experiments, search for evidence of new particles, and detect gravitational waves and exoplanets. While AI tools can clearly do a lot for physicists, the question now, according to Max Tegmark, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is: “Can we give anything back?”

Tegmark believes that his physicist peers can make significant contributions to the science of AI, and he has made this his top research priority. One way physicists could help advance AI technology, he said, would be to replace the “black box” algorithms of neural networks, whose workings are largely inscrutable, with well-understood equations of physical processes.

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