How OpenAI’s ChatGPT helped scientists crack a tedious physics problem

A team of physicists from various universities has teamed up with the artificial intelligence (AI) model GPT-5.2 to arrive at a new result in theoretical physics, OpenAI announced on February 13. While the result itself is obscure, although valuable to physicists working on the topic, the methods that the team and the model used to arrive at the result are turning heads. Imagine you’re trying to predict what happens when particles crash into each other. In particle physics, scientists calculate these predictions using something called scattering amplitudes — essentially formulae that spit out the probability of different outcomes when particles collide. Now, the traditional way to calculate these probabilities involves drawing lots of little diagrams called Feynman diagrams, which show all the possible ways the particles can interact. There are different types of diagrams but the new work focused on the simplest kind, called tree diagrams. These branch out like actual trees: particles come in, meet at the vertices where they interact, and go out, but the paths never loop back on themselves. Even though tree diagrams are the simplest type of Feynman diagram, as you add more particles to your collision, the number of different tree diagrams you need to draw and calculate grows terribly fast. For just a handful of particles, you might need to calculate thousands or millions of tree diagrams and add them all up. It can be exhausting. But here’s the thing: when physicists finally finish all that work and add everything up, they often find the answer is surprisingly simple, like a messy equation with a million terms somehow canceling down to just a few. This finding was actually quite shocking when physicists first arrived at it in the 1980s. It was a sign that they’re probably doing things the hard way and there could be a clever shortcut they hadn’t found yet. The new paper focused on a type of particle collisions involving gluons. Gluons are particles that act like glue holding the quarks together inside protons and neutrons. They’re the carriers of the strong force, which is one of nature’s four fundamental forces. When gluons interact with each other or with quarks, physicists need to calculate the scattering amplitudes to predict what will happen. Gluons have a property called helicity, akin to the direction of their spin. Think of it like whether a football is spiraling clockwise or counterclockwise as it flies through the air. Physicists label these helicity states with plus or minus signs: a gluon can have positive helicity (spinning one way) or negative helicity (spinning the opposite way). When they’re calculating the scattering amplitudes for gluon collisions, they need to keep track of which gluons have which helicity. For a long time, physicists believed certain combinations of spinning gluons would have zero amplitude, meaning these collisions can’t happen. Specifically, if you had one gluon spinning one way (call it minus) and a