What remains for physicists to do in the age of AI?
Giovanni Volpe
OPTIQUE BFC 2026
Date: 9 July 2026
Place: Palais des Congrès, Dijon, France
Giovanni Volpe gave the plenary presentation “What remains for physicists to do in the age of AI?” at OPTIQUE BFC 2026, the biennial congress of the Société Française d’Optique, held in Dijon, France, from 6 to 10 July 2026.
In recent years, the rapid growth of artificial intelligence, particularly deep learning, has transformed fields ranging from the natural sciences to technology. While deep learning can be regarded as a highly sophisticated form of curve fitting, the development of increasingly large and complex neural networks has led to remarkable advances, often surpassing expectations. As AI systems become ever more capable, this raises a fundamental question: what role remains for physicists and, more broadly, for humans?
A critical yet often overlooked aspect of current AI systems is their reliance on vast amounts of training data, much of which ultimately originates from humans. This raises important questions about what happens when human-generated data become scarce or when AI systems increasingly train on AI-generated content. Such feedback can lead models toward increasingly conventional or average outputs, potentially reducing originality and reliability.
In this context, physicists have a distinctive role to play. Their ability to develop fundamental understanding, identify symmetries and physical principles, design experiments, and formulate new questions can provide insights that cannot simply be extracted from existing datasets. Physics-informed approaches can also incorporate this knowledge directly into the architecture and training of AI systems.
The central message is that, in the age of AI, physicists should continue to be original, pursue fundamental questions, and search for the hidden principles governing the physical world.