diz

All joking aside, there is something thoroughly fucked up about this.

What's fucked up is that we let these rich fucks threaten us with extinction to boost their stock prices.

Imagine if some cold fusion scammer was permitted to gleefully boast that his experimental cold fusion plant in the middle of a major city could blow it up. Setting up little hydrogen explosions, setting up a neutron source just to make it spicier, etc.

It is as if there were people fantasizing about automaton mouths and lips and tongues and vocal cords for some reason, and come up with all these fantasies of how it'll be when automatons can talk.

And then Edison invents the phonograph.

And then they stick their you know what in the gearing between the cylinder and the screw.

Except somehow more stupid, because these guys are worried about AI apocalypse while boosting AI hype that pays for this supposed apocalypse.

edit: If someone said in 1850s "automatons won't be able to talk for another 150 years or longer because the vocal tract is too intricate", and some automaton fetishist says that they will be able to talk in 20 years, the phonograph shouldn't lend any credence whatsoever to the latter. What is different this time is that phonograph was genuinely extremely useful for what it is, while the generative AI is not quite as useful and they're going for the automaton fetishist money.

is somewhere between 0 and 100%.

That really pins it down, doesn't it?

When confronted with a problem like “your search engine imagined a case and cited it”, the next step is to wonder what else it might be making up, not to just quickly slap a bit of tape over the obvious immediate problem and declare everything to be great.

Exactly. Even if you ensure the cited cases or articles are real it will misrepresent what said articles say.

Fundamentally it is just blah blah blah ing until the point comes when a citation would be likely to appear, then it blah blah blahs the citation based on the preceding text that it just made up. It plain should not be producing real citations. That it can produce real citations is deeply at odds with it being able to pretend at reasoning, for example.

Ensuring the citation is real, RAG-ing the articles in there, having AI rewrite drafts, none of these hacks do anything to address any of the underlying problems.

Yeah. I’d love to see the prompt, gab’s nazi ai prompt was utterly pathetic and this one got to be pretty bad as well.

Actually, having read it carefully, it is interesting that they actually don't claim it was hacked, they claim that the modification was unauthorized. They also don't claim that they removed the access from that mysterious "employee" who modified it. I'm thinking they had some legal reason to technically not lie.

It re consumes its own bullshit, and the bullshit it does print is the bullshit it also fed itself, its not lying about that. Of course, it is also always re consuming the initial prompt too so the end bullshit isn’t necessarily quite as far removed from the question as the length would indicate.

Where it gets deceptive is when it knows an answer to the problem, but it constructs some bullshit for the purpose of making you believe that it solved the problem on its own. The only way to tell the difference is to ask it something simpler that it doesn’t know the answer to, and watch it bullshit in circles or to an incorrect answer.

I seriously doubt he ever worked anywhere like that, not to mention that he’s too spineless to actually get in trouble IRL.

He’s such a complete moron. He doesn’t want to recite “DEI shibboleths”? What does he even think that would refer to? Why shibboleths?

To spell it out, that would refer to an antisemitic theory that the reason (for example) some black guy would get a medal of honor (the “deimedal”) is because of the jews.

I swear this guy is dumber than Trump. Trump for all his rambling, uses actual language - Trump understands what the shit he is saying means to his followers. Scott… he really does not.

I think they worked specifically on cheating the benchmarks, though. As well as popular puzzles like pre existing variants of the river crossing - it is a very large puzzle category, very popular, if the river crossing puzzle is not on the list I don't know what would be.

Keep in mind that they are also true believers, too - they think that if they cram enough little pieces of logical reasoning, taken from puzzles, into the AI, then they will get robot god that will actually start coming up with new shit.

I very much doubt that there's some general reasoning performance improvement that results in these older puzzle variants getting solved, while new ones that aren't particularly more difficult, fail.

Did you use any of that kind of notation in the prompt? Or did some poor squadron of task workers write out a few thousand examples of this notation for river crossing problems in an attempt to give it an internal structure?

I didn't use any notation in the prompt, but gemini 2.5 pro seem to always represent state of the problem after every step in some way. When asked if it does anything with it says it is "very important", so it may be that there's some huge invisible prompt that says its very important to do this.

It also mentioned N cannibals and M missionaries.

My theory is that they wrote a bunch of little scripts that generate puzzles and solutions in that format. Since river crossing is one of the top most popular puzzles, it would be on the list (and N cannibals M missionaries is easy to generate variants of), although their main focus would have been the puzzles in the benchmarks that they are trying to cheat.

edit: here's one of the logs:

https://pastebin.com/GKy8BTYD

Basically it keeps on trying to brute force the problem. It gets first 2 moves correct, but in a stopped clock style manner - if there's 2 people and 1 boat they both take the boat, if there's 2 people and >=2 boats, then each of them takes a boat.

It keeps doing the same shit until eventually its state tracking fails, or its reading of the state fails, and then it outputs the failure as a solution. Sometimes it deems it impossible:

https://pastebin.com/Li9quqqd

All tests done with gemini 2.5 pro, I can post links if you need them but links don't include their "thinking" log and I also suspect that if >N people come through a link they just look at it. Nobody really shares botshit unless its funny or stupid. A lot of people independently asking the same problem, that would often happen if there's a new homework question so they can't use that as a signal so easily.

Yeah I think the best examples are everyday problems that people solve all the time but don't explicitly write out solutions step by step for, or not in the puzzle-answer form.

It's not even a novel problem at all, I'm sure there's even a plenty of descriptions of solutions to it as part of stories and such. Just not as "logical puzzles" due to triviality.

What really annoys me is when they claim high performance on benchmarks consisting of fairly difficult problems. This is basically fraud, since they know full well it is still entirely "knowledge" reliant, and even take steps to augment it with generated problems and solutions.

I guess the big sell is that it could use bits and pieces of logic gleaned from other solutions to solve a "new" problem. Except it can not.