Comment by PlasmonOwl
Comment by PlasmonOwl 13 hours ago
Ok so I am always interested in these papers as a chemist. Often, we find that the LLM are terrible at chemistry. This is because the lived experience of a chemist is fundamentally different from the education they receive. Often, a masters student takes 6 months to become productive at research in a new sub field. A PhD, around 3 months.
Most chemists will begin to develop an intuition. This is where the issues develop.
This intuition is a combination of the chemists mental model, and how the sensory environment stimulates that. As a polymer chemist in a certain system maybe brown means I see scattering hence particles. My system is supposed to be homogeneous so I bin the reaction.
It is often known that good grades don’t make good researchers. That’s because researchers aren’t doing rote recall.
So the issue is this: we ask the LLM how many proton environment in this nmr?
We should ask: I’m intercalating Li into a perovskite using BuLi. Why does the solution turn pink?
I think a huge reason why LLMs are so far ahead in programming is because programming exists entirely in a known and totally severed digital environment outside our own. To become a master programmer all you need is a laptop and an internet connection. The nature of it existing entirely in a parallel digital universe just lends itself perfectly to training.
All of that is to say that I don't think the classic engineering fields have some kind of knowledge or intuition that is truly inaccessible to LLMs, I just think that it is in a form that is too difficult right now to train on. However if you could train a model on them, I strongly suspect they would get to the same level they are at today with software.