This fits nicely with yesterday's AI compass quiz. The folks interviewed kinda fall all over the spectrum. Also, the author kinda lost me early on when they called astrophysicists stargazers. astrophysics is kinda mostly hard hard maths, right? Astronomers gather the data, but not all astronomers are astrophysicists and few ap's are astronomers per se.
I'm thinking that there will always be somewhere challenging for the maths geniuses, whether it's called astrophysics or not.

As a former astrophysicist and, more importantly, the father of a college student studying astrophysics, I have mixed feelings about this.
First, I think that it is naive to think that just because you can use an LLM to solve some problems, you don't need grad students. Education in physics (and medicine, and many other fields) follows an apprentice model. The real learning comes from banging your head against a seemingly insurmountable problem, all the failed experiments, quenched super conductors, misbehaving circuits, helium leaks. You learn to persevere, to not lose hope, to keep going, to try new things. An LLM can't replace that.

I'm not saying we shouldn't use LLMs. We absolutely should. But we have to learn how to modify our ways of teaching because otherwise no one will be left to interpret what the LLMs are putting out.