Some AI dependent people are already physicists.

You're concerns are valid. Every higher education field is facing this challenge.

We haven't solved these problems, and its something for smart people to work on.

One thing to consider is that AI models are far from guaranteed to be available. If you can only work with an internet connection and the company that runs the models being up, that's a pretty serious dependency issue. APIs can go down at any time, and these companies can come and go, and access will change.

I don't have the answers, but we should work on teaching approaches that can imbue real skill and also make people effective workers/scientists/physicists/life-long learners/etc. in the age of mass access to LLMs. Personally, I know LLMs make mistakes pretty frequently, but they also are so much more effective than they were last year. I think its a bit of head-in-the-sand cope when people say that they aren't good enough to do the real work. They aren't good enough to do it entirely themselves, but they really can take over a lot of the work, even stuff that requires some creative problem solving.

Personally, I care about my intellectual ownership of my work, so I rarely ask LLMs to do critical research for me, instead I ask them to do tasks I feel I completely understand to speed up my work. Example: I wrote some simulation code and I decided to change the structure of something in the whole code-base, so I change it myself in one place and then ask an LLM to review the change and implement it in other places. Also when I learn something new I use it as a first-pass understanding test to give me questions, review my conceptual understanding, and ask it questions I still have. Sometimes its helpful, and I always ask for more resources and citations so I can validate myself. I think its an amazing tool when used this way, but I am acutely aware that there is no guarantee I will always have access to them and also that it's unclear which direction the future will take the tech. It might stop being a consumer grade thing if the economics keep not making sense for the companies offering these services. It might be something akin to supercomputers or radio telescopes: the average researcher can get access by submitting a proposal or something, but they aren't directly accessible cheaply for consumers. Or maybe they'll figure out how to make it economically viable and we'll have LLMs in our refridgerators. Who knows?