Some HEP-TH News

In a previous posting, I’d noted that the number of arXiv hep-th preprints/month was significantly higher recently, clearly due to LLM use, but that I hadn’t heard of much in the way of significant new results coming from this. Around the same time, Matt von Hippel issued a challenge to the LLM agents: So if AI companies want to impress people like me (or scare us, for that matter), then they need to tackle my old field. Show that an AI can take the kinds of computer resources an academic has access to, and solve one of the scattering amplitudes field’s big outstanding problems. Show that a computational limit everyone expected to be a problem doesn’t actually matter. Give us N=8 supergravity to seven loops, or N=4 super Yang-Mills to nine loops. People at Anthropic took up the challenge, and today announced that Yes, Claude can do Nine Loops. Supposedly this was a “one-shot”: after asking Claude which problem it was most likely to be able to tackle, they gave it a simple prompt: “The…