AI needs physics more than physics needs AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is commonly depicted as transformative. Yet, after more than a decade of hype, its measurable impact remains modest outside a few high-profile scientific and commercial successes. The 2024 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Physics recognized AI’s potential, but broader assessments indicate the impact to date is often more promotional than technical. We argue that while current AI may influence physics, physics has significantly more to offer this generation of AI. Current architectures—large language models, reasoning models, and agentic AI–can depend on trillions of meaningless parameters, suffer from distributional bias, lack uncertainty quantification, provide no mechanistic insights, and fail to capture even elementary scientific laws. We review critiques of these limits, highlight opportunities in quantum AI and analogue computing, and lay down a roadmap for the adoption of ‘Big AI’: a synthesis of theory-based rigour with the flexibility of machine learning.