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 )
What I'm trying to say.
Is that complaining that chatgpt is trying to make sense of nonsense input. Isn't really that compelling an argument.
There are way more important things to hate it for.
No, I'm not complaining that chatgpt is shit at reasoning - I'm demonstrating it.
I'm complaining that literal trillions of dollars plus environmental resources are being poured into this fundamentally flawed technology, all while fucking up the job market for entry level applicants.
I'll repost what i said in another comment.
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.
This is in no way "nonsense input". It is grammatically sound. It is perfectly clear and understandable upon reading it. No human being with even elementary comprehension of English would find it unclear. They may find the question odd. They may ask for clarification. But they will not randomly say "oh, this is just like the farmer/goat/cabbage/wolf problem" and make unwarranted parallels that are not supported by the language of the question.
That is the point here.
This isn't "Ph.D. level reasoning" on display. This is worse than "kindergarten level reasoning".
As per my other comments where i did this experiment myself.
It seems chatgpt got into search mode.
So instead of working from the original string.
It's working from a search of that string.
And since the string contains all the keywords for the goat puzzle.
It's just treating it like the goat puzzle.
I ran it on DeepSeek with the search turned off and the "reasoning" turned on. It took 453 seconds of "thinking" to ... give me the farmer/sheep/wolf answer of 7.
No search.
The LLMbecile was just that stupid.
Sorry you can't face this.
LLMbeciles are just stupid.
Once more for the bleachers: LLMbeciles are just stupid.
No amount of making idiot excuses about "search borking the results" is going to change this.
LLMbeciles. Are. Just. Stupid.
Don't give a shit what deepseek thinks.
Don't know why you think I care either.
The only thing it tells me is that chatgpt is smarter, because it got the right answer.
And I don't feel like creating a deepseek account to test it over there.
Might give Google Gemini a go though.
My results in the chatgpt experiment incase you want to see it.
Search results
You understand what "random" means, right? (Or more scholarly "stochastic".)
NO LLMbecile is "smart". Not one. They're all idiot boxes who just predict the next "token" (close-enough proxy: "word"). That's it.
They do not think.
They do not reason.
They are not intelligent.
What they are is "fluent" which is why so many people (like you) get fooled by them. We have hundreds of thousands of years of evolution that ties "fluency" to "intellect" and have difficulty separating them.
But this is a skill you (and here I mean both the generic "you" and the "you specifically") have to learn … really quickly.
Favouring one LLMbecile over another is kind of like favouring one patch of vacuum in space over another. Sure there's minor differences of the trace contents, but they're still vacuums, effectively containing nothing.
Now how 'bout you do your peddling of LLMbeciles in a group that's not literally called "Fuck AI"? M'kay? I'm not here to listen to clankfuckers bleat about how their favourite stochastic parrot is better than other stochastic parrots. Go join /c/clankfuckersandotherlosers or something.
So here's the Gemini result