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 )
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
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.
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
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
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.
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