Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics Meets Diffusion Model

It is becoming increasingly clear that well-established techniques in information theory and many-body physics are having an important bearing on various models of AI. I discuss one such prominent example known as the diffusion-based generative AI, or simply the diffusion model, whose ideas are firmly rooted in nonequilibrium statistical physics. I argue that data science may be the new “thermodynamics” of the 21st century and the time is ripe for physicists to make meaningful contributions to it.