Physics Letters B paper built on a GPT-5 idea draws criticism that it tests the wrong thing
Disputed
The takeaway
Physicist Steve Hsu published a Physics Letters B paper whose main idea, applying the Tomonaga–Schwinger formalism to test state-dependent (nonlinear) quantum mechanics, came from GPT-5.
Status
- Claim
Disputed
- Our reporting
- Medium confidence
- Verification
- Peer-reviewed
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 AstraIn its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 HydrogenIn its training data
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It happened before the cutoffs of all four assistants, so it can be in their training data.
Key facts
- Claim (Hsu): ‘first research article in theoretical physics in which the main idea came from an AI’
- Rebuttal: Oppenheim, arXiv 2512.07809
- Peer-reviewed publication did not prevent a substantive correctness dispute
What happened
A physicist credited GPT-5 with the core idea of a peer-reviewed paper, and other physicists argued the idea was flawed.
Why it matters
It is a cautionary example: AI-originated ideas can pass peer review and still be wrong or misframed.
Sources
3 sources from 3 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
3 sources: 1 press, 2 reactions
Press
- The Decoder: Physicist Steve Hsu publishes research built around a core idea generated by GPT-5the-decoder.com, press
Reactions
- Oppenheim rebuttal (arXiv 2512.07809)arxiv.org, discussion
- Peter Woit: Theoretical Physics Slopmath.columbia.edu, discussion
Changes
- Filed