Am I supposed to be impressed? I have a PhD level intelligence and I am not exactly impressive.
this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2025
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You missed what they meant. It means gpt5 is really good at one arbitrary and extremely specific topic. Anything else it's comparable with a random person on the street.
Reality is the opposite though. GPT5 is expert in a pretty wide amount of trivia. It’s better than the average uneducated person in every subject, but worse than an expert in every subject.
And the average person has (usually) no idea if what they're being fed is even correct. But as long as it sounds correct to someone who has no idea...
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I still count and do math with my fingers and still fuck it up. I guess they're just like us. 🥲
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Most people have PHD intelligence. They just don’t have the motivation, need or care to do all that fucking work to get it.
To be honest, as I chat with more and more random strangers these days it does begin to dawn on me that we all do roughly spend ~70 years on this planet devoting our attention to one thing or another, and that though people might not have what is seen as "classical intelligence" (i.e. high IQ's, political savvy, high empathy / sociopathy, etc.), we are genuinely absolute genius's in one particular field or another.
For example, I had an old roommate whose politics would make me drink and stare at the horizon whilst he consistently acted against his own self interests to punish people he was told are responsibly for his financial lot in life. But, he was an absolute wizard when it came to predicting the outcome of a sports game. It could be anything - football, hockey, tennis, whatever - he immediately ran their stats straight off the top off his head, summarized their strengths and weaknesses and came out with an outcome that was on the whole close to the truth.
Another example, my ex. We never really had deep philosophical discussions about the state of the world, and her consumerist lifestyle was one I tried to actively ignore. But, she was incredible at turning a house into a home -- her interior design skills would genuinely surprise me at how well-thought out and in-depth they were, not only in terms of style and decor, but also in the way that she would execute and coordinate the tasks with me to beautify our home.
TL;DR -- I do really think most people have high intelligence in one specific field or another, we just value people unequally using classical measures of success (wealth, education)
If your roommate was so good at predicting the outcome of sporting events, couldn’t he have used that skill to fix his financial situation, rather than blame others?
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To obtain a PhD, you need to contribute something original to your field of study, not just regurgitate what you've scraped from other studies.
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The word 'intelligence' doing a lot of heavy lifting in that headline.
Can I eat this uranium GPT5 physicist?
Of course you can. Since it’s flavor is a little metallic, you might want to grind it and use it as a seasoning with your preferred dish.
You can eat anything once.
I hate the way the media makes this problem so much worse by incorrectly describing LLMs. They can't "have intelligence". They are incapable of any kind of thought. The "intelligence" of GPT1 and GPT5 are the same, in that neither have any. They are complex computational algorithms designed to generate text from prompts. That is absolutely not the same thing as thinking or knowing things.
There are entire cults springing out of the ground believing LLMs to literally be thinking feeling beings 💀 we are so beyond fucked.
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Just a few... more... trillion dollars! And all your drinking water.
And slave labor, not only to build the hardware, but to view the mountains of CSAM and other heinous material to build the "guardrails"
PhDs themselves aren't very smart. They're just sheets of paper. 🤷♂️
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They’re also talking about data centers in space, yet are too cheap to use anything but evaporative cooling + supplemental gas generators on Earth.
I did some math on, amongst other things, launch costs for an Earth-data center sized installation, or the area needed to radiatively cool it, and it is fun:
https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/heatrad.php
See that power of four? Areas get very large, like kilometers wide, if you want your coolant below a typical 300K (~30C), and apparently no one told Bezos that little detail.
Those space construction startups know what they’re doing. They’re selling billionaires a bridge to nowhere; and it’s working.
Capitalism has a whole lot of cult-like qualities. The space stuff just shows we are end game.
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I feel like I've been hearing this stupid "PhD level intelligence" claim about every LLM that's come out since ChatGPT was first released, including GPT-3.0 which it launched with. It kind of amazes me that people keep falling for it and not questioning how the new model having "PhD level intelligence" is both a true claim and also noteworthy when the claim is made about every new model.
Iv met enough phd holders to know that they can and frequently are still unabashedly wrong on the vast majority of everything they talk about that isn't hyper specific to a narrow and niche topic.
So phd level intelligence to me just means it's more prone to the being confidently wrong and judgemental.
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so it still won't know how to make me a sandwitch?
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Me: “Hey GPT-5 Ive been diagnosed cancer.” GPT-5: “Have you thought about using cocaine and essential oils!”
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Based on the fact that they'd give someone like me a PhD, this comes as no surprise. But it's not saying as much about GPT-5 as a lot of people might think.
If you take me as the reference PhD, then it'd be stupid as fuck.
GPT5 was an effort by OpenAI to reduce costs. It is not smarter than the latest GPT4 models.
Because they are unable to make it smarter
If they could have made it smarter they would have
There are models smarter than GPT5.
Someone with a PHD isn't inherently more intelligent than other humans. They are able to put in the time and effort to become a subject matter expert in a field.
I get that it's all buzz, but they simply don't understand human intelligence, how can they even dream to replicate it. AGI is a myth.
My wife is currently writing her dissertation. So no shade to PHDs.
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As someone who has a PhD and self identifies as a dumbass I can confidently say, it is not a high bar
They said that for v3.5 lol
does that mean it's also going to have PhD-level depression?
it'll know all about cellular biology and not be able to operate a cash register.
I still really doubt the ability for LLMs to develop new knowledge and experiment to prove its accuracy. They do a below average job at spitting out existing knowledge but creating new information that isn’t already on Wikipedia or elsewhere on the internet is something else beyond their scope.
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Yes. "PhD" level intelligence. Not PhD level intelligence. The quotes are part of the word. They are not optional.
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I know a dude with a PhD in Computer Science who's far-right and his sister is a psychiatrist who thinks conversion therapy works lol lmao
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“Intelligence” is such a dumb word.
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