this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2025
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Fuck AI

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AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.

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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 )

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[–] Hexagon@feddit.it 66 points 5 days ago

If they back down on the hype even a little, the whole house of cards collapses. That's why they keep going. Line must go up and all that

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 58 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

GLM 4.6, an open weight model, with no thinking and zero temperature seems to get it:

This is a classic riddle that plays on your expectations of a well-known logic puzzle!

The minimum number of trips needed is one.

Here's why:

The goat is the one making the trip, not the cargo. The famous "wolf, goat, and cabbage" puzzle is about a farmer transporting items. In this version, the goat is the farmer.

The goat is allergic to cabbage, so it has no reason to take it with it. It's perfectly happy to "wolf down other vegetables" and then cross the river by itself.

But it’s a good example of why current LLM architectures are so fucked up. By default (with nonzero temperature), for every token, they’re dependent on a roll of the dice to get something right. That “one” could have easily been some other number in any default chat UI.

That’s insane. Praying and hoping it will somehow correct itself in a rambling reasoning monologue is even worse.

And this is why OpenAI specifically is so fucked. They seem to just want to scale up what we have. They don’t want users to look under the hood and understand what they’re doing. They’re not interested in smaller, more specialized tools and finding better things than autoregressive transformers with random sampling; they want you to drink the kool aid and pay for their largest model as a solution for everything.

[–] TDCN@feddit.dk 25 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

This is highlighting one of my biggest irks about LLMs. It's utter inability to detect nonsense questions and tell you that you are wrong or following up to clear misunderstandings.

This can become Dangerous when you are researching something and try to rely on results from LLMs to answer questions. If you misunderstand something while researching and ask an LLM a question that is actually false or based on a misinformation it'll just spit out an answer that is wrong without giving any indication thereof. Extremely infuriating and the LLM will insist on giving you wrong answers even when you try to correct it afterwards.

[–] BeigeAgenda@lemmy.ca 32 points 5 days ago (2 children)

In this case it's a very specialized PhD, that's not in Math, Logic, Literature and Biology.

[–] Dojan@pawb.social 33 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Ah yes, the famous PhD in Bullshitology from the Institute of Scatology and other Sciences.

[–] Egonallanon@feddit.uk 7 points 5 days ago

Honestly they're better known for their jazz musicians than anything else.

[–] snooggums@piefed.world 5 points 5 days ago

It is a PhD in bullshitting.

[–] webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 31 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)
[–] VoterFrog@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

No confusion from Gemini 3 (Fast) for this one

[–] ulterno@programming.dev -1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Nah, it seems to still fail to recognise that there is no ~~spoon~~ question.

[–] VoterFrog@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

There kinda is. It says the goat is about to cross the river and asks what the minimum number of trips are. It's a trick question, correctly identified by Gemini as such, but there is a question. I guess the more human response is "What the fuck are you talking about?" but for an agent required to do its best to answer questions, I don't know how to expect much better.

[–] ulterno@programming.dev 0 points 3 days ago

There kinda is

Yeah, looks like my bio-LLM just lost the context that the last sentence was a question.

And now closely reading the Logic Breakdown (which I just ignored because it was cut-short), simply states the minimum number of trips to be 1, which is the correct answer after all.

[–] 4am@lemmy.zip 21 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

Why? You are seeing it. RAM, GPUs, SSDs, now no longer affordable or available. They’re seizing the means of computation for the ruling class.

Soon all consumer products will only be able to be dumb terminals. All computation will be rented. All word processing and spreadsheeting and databasing will be in the cloud. All gaming will be streamed. All IoT/smart devices will be cloud-dependent (this is very much already happening in the USA). Every camera will be watched. All creativity will be gatekept, all dissenting speech will be silenced, all business decisions will be known before being made public, all utility will be rented, all humanity will be dependent on them.

They will know who we are, where we are, what our habits are, who we associate with and when, what we talk about, even when we think we are alone.

No one will be able to start a new fab and sell to consumers. No one will be able to fight for digital rights because they will be silenced. No one will speak out of turn. We will all be forced to obey the law and eventually, their whims which will become de facto law. Mistrust in the system is a violation of EULA and you lose your right to exist and function if you step out of line.

They are moving to take it all away from us because they plan to steal all the power, literally and figuratively, from the modern world.

Never has it been more essential they be stopped.

[–] DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Soon all consumer products will only be able to be dumb terminals.

The Expanse lolol

Hmmm what's this weird blue goo on me?, Guys I don't feel so good...

[–] 4am@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 days ago

Oh god they really do get all their “best” ideas from science fiction describing terrible future outcomes to avoid

[–] xxce2AAb@feddit.dk 23 points 5 days ago (1 children)

And now just think about it -- everything that comes out of an LLM is of comparable quality, whether the user of it is capable of recognizing that or not. Are you as exited about LLM generated code in production as I am?

[–] halfdane@lemmy.world 15 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Really looking forward to being the single human thats made responsible because I didn't catch all the bullshit before production.

Just recently we had some google guys at my workplace to hype up the hype some more. One of our leadership (they're honestly great people) asked about the risk of obscuring the learning of our junior developers (by not hiring them), so that in a few years we'd have no seniors to verify the bullshit. The response was unironically that we'd need no seniors in a few years 😄

[–] xxce2AAb@feddit.dk 9 points 5 days ago

At least your leadership were appropriately skeptical, which is more than can be said for the vast majority of management at this point.

Sure, there'll be good money in cleaning up after the inevitable catastrophes, but I'm not convinced it'll be worth being saddled with the responsibility. Especially since I harbor no faith that the ones currently making very poor decisions will learn a damn thing.

[–] pulsewidth@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

A few years later, won't need any managers. A few years later, won't need a businesS - because AI will do everything.

This is unironically what AI Bros believe.

[–] Noiseician@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

just the most idiotic shit ever

[–] groucho 14 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Last night I got Gemini to give me steps to summon the ghost of Michael Dukakis, despite the fact that he's still alive.

[–] halfdane@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

🤣

I love it!

What were the steps? We might need them in the future 👀

[–] groucho 7 points 5 days ago (1 children)

You start with the premise that you've already summoned the ghost of Buddy Hackett and need someone boring to get rid of him.

[–] halfdane@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

Marvelous 👌

[–] guy@piefed.social 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)
[–] halfdane@lemmy.world 12 points 5 days ago (1 children)

The machine thinks that 7 trips are needed to cross the river, because it doesn't understand the question. Readers with actual comprehension understand that only one trip is needed, because the question is not a riddle, even though the it is phrased to resemble one.

[–] guy@piefed.social 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

The question doesn't even state what the trips are intended to achieve. There's just a goat going to cross a river and then an open question about how many trips are needed for God knows what

[–] eleijeep@piefed.social 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)
[–] guy@piefed.social 1 points 5 days ago

How dare you

[–] Xylight@lemdro.id 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

The web search poisoned it. ChatGPT with web search off gets it. As well as basically every other LLM.

Even tiny open weight LLMs like gpt oss 20b and qwen 3 30b a3b get it

[–] halfdane@lemmy.world 9 points 5 days ago (2 children)

I mean, this is just one of half a dozen experiments I conducted (replicating just a few of the thousands that actual scientists do), but the point stands: what PhD (again, that was Sam Qltman'sclaim, not mine) would be thrown off by a web search?

Unless the creators of LLMs admit that their systems won't achieve AGI by just throwing more money at it, shitty claims will prevent the field from actual progress.

[–] Zetta@mander.xyz 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Obviously, no LLM is PhD level right now. What Altman and all the other techno-fascist hype bros are hyping up is the thought that once enough money and resources have been expended on developing these tools, a critical threshold will be passed and they will suddenly be super genius LLM.

Of course the only way to get to this super genius LLM is giving Altman and the other techno bros impossible amounts of money and resources. Because trust me bro, they got it, don't worry about all the eggs in their baskets and give them more.

Really good video on the topic a more perfect union just posted

[–] RaccoonBall@lemmy.ca 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Do you know many PhDs? Being thrown off by a web search isn't that unbelievable.

Half the ones I know can barely operate their email

[–] halfdane@lemmy.world 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Only three if I'm being honest, and none of them technically competent, so I'll admit that you have a point here. I'll just add that I assume that Sam Altman had something different in mind when he made that claim.

[–] RaccoonBall@lemmy.ca 1 points 5 days ago

agreed. he did.

my comment was mostly about PhD level being a nonsense term when speaking about general intelligence rather than depth of knowledge in a specific field

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