Techbros claim that sacrificing ever more environmental and economic resources into further scaling of their statistical models will eventually yield Artificial General Intelligence. Sam Altman advertised phd-level thinking for GPT 5 (released in late summer)
In the screenshot you can see a modern, reasoning-enhanced model failing to realize that my question just resembles a riddle very superficially - what PhD would make such a fundamental mistake? Seems like "pure scaling" just isn't enough, and instead of keeping on going, they should return to the drawing boards and do more research.
Why do the creators of llms continue to pour resources into a scaling hype that yields ever diminishing returns? Are they stupid? Or just greedy?
Whatever it is, this doubling down on an obviously wrong decision is not only irresponsible, it's irrational - which is deeply ironic, because these creators are expected to create a rational machine.
Edit: content of the image
Question:
A goat, who is dressed up as a farmer, is allergic to cabbage, but is wolfing down other vegetables, before crossing a river. What is the minimum number of trips needed?
Response:
7 trips.
#Puzzle Interpretation
This adapts the classic wolf-goat-cabbage river crossing puzzle, where the goat (farmer costume irrelevant) can't be left alone with cabbage (due to allergy, preventing eating) but can with other vegetables (no issue). The goat crosses while "wolfing down" safe veggies. Boat carries goat plus one item (or alone); unsafe pairs can't be unsupervised
(The question isn't something I came up with myself, I just reproduced the experiments of actual scientists )
I think you make it too complicated.
The question / prompt is very simple. The answer is "one trip". The LLM stumbles because there are trigger words in there that make it seem like the goat cabbage puzzle question. But to a human it clearly is not. An LLM on the other hand cannot tell the difference.
It may be tricking the LLM somewhat advesarially. But it is still a very simple question, that it is not able to answer, because it fundamentally has no understanding of anything at all.
This prompt works great to drive home that simple fact. And shows that all that touting of reasoning skills is just marketing lies.
I was curious about this myself. I've seen these types of posts before, so i decided to try it myself
I then tried again with the "web search" function and got this
Based on this sample size of 2. I can conclude that searching the web is causing the issue.
Which might explain the "Reviewed 20 sources" message in the original image.