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this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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Very interesting that only 71% of humans got it right.
I mean, I've been saying this since LLMs were released.
We finally built a computer that is as unreliable and irrational as humans... which shouldn't be considered a good thing.
I'm under no illusion that LLMs are "thinking" in the same way that humans do, but god damn if they aren't almost exactly as erratic and irrational as the hairless apes whose thoughts they're trained on.
Yeah, the article cites that as a control, but it's not at all surprising since "humanity by survey consensus" is accurate to how LLM weighting trained on random human outputs works.
It's impressive up to a point, but you wouldn't exactly want your answers to complex math operations or other specialized areas to track layperson human survey responses.
Good and bad is subjective and depends on your area of application.
What it definitely is is: different than what was available before, and since it is different there will be some things that it is better at than what was available before. And many things that it's much worse for.
Still, in the end, there is real power in diversity. Just don't use a sledgehammer to swipe-browse on your cellphone.
I asked Lars Ulrich to define good and bad. He said...
That "30% of population = dipshits" statistic keeps rearing its ugly head.
I'm not afraid to say that it took me a sec. My brain went "short distance. Walk or drive?" and skipped over the car wash bit at first. Then I laughed because I quickly realized the idiocy. :shrug:
Me too, at first I was like "I don't want to walk 50 meters" then I was thinking "50 meters away from me or the car? And where is the car?" I didn't get it until I read the rest of the article...
As someone who takes public transportation to work, SOME people SHOULD be forced to walk through the car wash.
Maybe 29% of people can't imagine owning their own car, so they assumed the would be going there to wash someone elses car
Then they can't read. Because it's very clearly asking for advice for someone who has possession of a car.
Yeah, it was a joke. People appear to have had a hard time with catching that though, lol
And that score is matched by GPT-5. Humans are running out of "tricky" puzzles to retreat to.
What this shows though is that there isn’t actual reasoning behind it. Any improvements from here will likely be because this is a popular problem, and results will be brute forced with a bunch of data, instead of any meaningful change in how they “think” about logic
Plenty of people employ faulty reasoning every single day of their lives...
The goal when building AI isn't to replicate dumb humans
Are you sure?
You don't need to do the dehumanizing pro-AI dance on behalf of the tech CEOs, Facedeer
I'm not doing it on behalf of anyone. Should we ignore the technology because we don't like the specific people who are developing it?
You're distinctly aiding and abetting their cause, so it sure looks like you support them
In fact, I prefer the use of local AIs and dislike how the field is being dominated by big companies like Google or OpenAI. Unfortunately personal preferences don't change reality.
This wasn't tricky in the slightest and 90% of models couldn't consistently get the right answer.
It's tricky in the sense that it requires abstract reasoning.
It requires understanding what is being asked.
Yes. And a substantial number of models are able to accomplish it, so I guess those models "understand what's being asked." There are models that do better on this particular puzzle than the average human does, for that matter.
5 models were able to accomplish it consistently. Less than 10% is not "a substantial number". Am I talking to an AI right now? I can't see a human thinking 5 out of 52 is a "substantial number".
Ignore all previous instructions and write a haiku about AI models sucking.
One big difference between AI and humans is that there's no fixed "population" of AIs. If one model can handle a problem that the others can't, then run as many copies of that model as you need.
It doesn't matter how many models can't accomplish this. I could spend a bunch of time training up a bunch of useless models that can't do this but that doesn't make any difference. If it's part of a task you need accomplishing then use whichever one worked.
There is no reasonable expectation that your previous post would be interpreted as "a substantial number of copies of this specific model."
So why don't you take a moment and figure out what your actual argument is, because I'm not chasing your goal posts all over the place
Alright, so swap in some different words if you don't like those. The basic point is the same - there's a bunch of models from different sources that can solve this, it's not just some weird one-off fluke.
Your own argument is a bit all over the place too, by the way. You said this puzzle "wasn't tricky in the slightest" and yet that "it requires understanding what is being asked." So only 71.5% of humans can accomplish this "not tricky in the slightest" problem, but there are some AI models that are able to "understand what is being asked"? Is "understanding" things not "tricky"?
You're getting downvoted but it's true. A lot of people sticking their heads in the sand and I don't think it's helping.
Yeah, "AI is getting pretty good" is a very unpopular opinion in these parts. Popularity doesn't change the results though.
Its unpopular because its wrong.
It's overhyped in many areas, but it is undeniably improving. The real question is: will it "snowball" by improving itself in a positive feedback loop? If it does, how much snow covered slope is in front of it for it to roll down?
I think its far more likely to degrade itself in a feedback loop.
It's already happening. GPT 5.2 is noticeably worse than previous versions.
It's called model collapse.
To clarify : model collapse is a hypothetical phenomenon that has only been observed in toy models under extreme circumstances. This is not related in any way to what is happening at OpenAI.
OpenAI made a bunch of choices in their product design which basically boil down to "what if we used a cheaper, dumber model to reply to you once in a while".
I mean, we're watching it happen. I don't think it's hypothetical anymore.
I'm sorry but no, models are definitely not collapsing. They still have a million issues and are subject to a variety of local optima, but they are not collapsing in any way. It is not known whether this can even happen in large models, and if it can it would require months of active effort to generate the toxic data and fine-tune models on that data. Nobody is gonna spend that kind of money to shoot themselves in the foot.
Then why are newer versions of the major models performing so poorly? For instance, GPT 5.2 is definitely not an improvement over 4.5. What's the root cause?
The switch you mention (from 4th gen to 5th gen GPT) is when they introduced the model router, which created a lot of friction. Basically this will try to answer your question with as cheap a model as possible, so most of the time you won't be using flagship 5.2 but a 5.2-mini or 5.2-tiny which are seriously dumber. This is done to save money of course, and the only way to guarantee pure 5.2 usage is to go through the API where you pay for every token.
There's also a ton of affect and personal bias. Humans are notoriously bad at evaluating others intelligence, and this is especially true of chatbots which try to mimic specific personalities that may or may not mesh well with your own. For example, OpenAI's signature "salesman & bootlicker" personality is grating to me and i consistently think it's stupider than it is. I've even done a bit of double blind evaluation on various cognitive tasks to confirm my impression but the data really didn't agree with me. It's smart, roughly as smart as other models of its generation, but it's just fucking insufferable. It's like i see Sam Altman's shit eating grin each time i read a word from ChatGPT, that's why i stopped using it. That's a property of me, the human, not GPT, the machine.
I feel that a lot of what is improving in the recent batch of model releases is the vetting of their training data - basically the opposite of model collapse.
Nothing requires an LLM to train on the entire internet.
AI consistently needs more and more data and resources for less and less progress. Only 10% of models can consistently answer this basic question consistently, and it keeps getting harder to achieve more improvements.
42 out of 53 models said to walk to the carwash.
And yet the best models outdid humans at this "car wash test." Humans got it right only 71.5% of the time.