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Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit

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Re: Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit

#161

Post by aldanor »

tim333 wrote: post #150
r_klancer wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gemini (2.5 Pro): "Yes, Paul Newman was widely known for being a heavy drinker, particularly of beer. He himself acknowledged his significant alcohol consumption." The answer I got ( https://gemini.google.com/share/9e327dc4be03 ) includes references such as https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-reviews-movies-paul... and https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-playing-field/20... although they are redacted fro…

Perplexity: >Paul Newman is indeed known for having struggled with alcohol during his life. Accounts from various sources, including his own memoir and the documentary ... ( https://www.perplexity.ai/search/is-paul-newman-known-for-ha... ) I guess there's something about ChatGPT's set up that makes it different? Maybe they wanted it to avoid libeling people?

Grok:

> Yes, Paul Newman was known to have struggled with alcohol at certain points in his life. In his early years, particularly during his time in the Navy and into his acting career, Newman admitted to heavy drinking. He was open about his fondness for beer and once jokingly referred to himself as a “functional alcoholic.” In a 1988 interview with The New York Times, he acknowledged that he had a period where he drank too much, stating, “I was a very good drinker. I could put it away.” ...

https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_86843e8a-39ee-415d-8785-4f8e...

Re: Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit

#162

Post by terminatornet »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #63
aerhardt wrote: post #34

My mom told me yesterday that Paul Newman had massive problems with alcohol. I was somewhat skeptical, so this morning I asked ChatGPT a very simple question: "Is Paul Newman known for having had problems with alcohol?" All of the models up to o3-mini-high told me he had no known problems. Here's o3-mini-high's response: "Paul Newman is not widely known for having had problems with alcohol. While he portrayed charact…

This is less an LLM thing than an information retrieval question. If you choose a model and tell it to “Search,” you find citation based analysis that discusses that he indeed had problems with alcohol. I do find it interesting it quibbles whether he was an alcoholic or not - it seems pretty clear from the rest that he was - but regardless. This is indicative of something crucial when placing LLMs into a toolkit. The…

lotta words here to say AI can't do basic search right

Re: Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit

#163

Post by jcgrillo »

dadadad100 wrote: post #115
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would hope that 100% of them would be able to figure out how to find out .

Ah, but isn’t that the problem here - asking an LLM for facts without requesting a search is like asking a PhD to answer a question “off the top of your head”. For pop culture questions the PhD likely brings little value.

They should know better than to guess. Educated, honest, intelligent people don't spout off a wild ass guess, if they don't know something they say so.

Re: Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit

#164

Post by d_burfoot »

aerhardt wrote: post #34

My mom told me yesterday that Paul Newman had massive problems with alcohol. I was somewhat skeptical, so this morning I asked ChatGPT a very simple question: "Is Paul Newman known for having had problems with alcohol?" All of the models up to o3-mini-high told me he had no known problems. Here's o3-mini-high's response: "Paul Newman is not widely known for having had problems with alcohol. While he portrayed charact…

For questions like this, you need to tell the bot to search the web.

> Hi, can you search the web and find out if Paul Newman has any alcohol problems?

> Paul Newman, the acclaimed actor and philanthropist, had a well-documented fondness for alcohol, particularly beer. He was known to consume significant quantities, with some accounts noting he would drink a case of beer in a day. This level of consumption led some to describe him as a functioning alcoholic. His drinking habits reportedly caused strain in his marriage to Joanne Woodward. In the late 1970s, an incident occurred where Woodward did not allow Newman back into their house because of his drinking. He promised to give up hard liquor as a compromise, but continued to drink beer, sometimes consuming a case during dinner.

Re: Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit

#165

Post by boznz »

drooby wrote: post #38
aerhardt wrote: post #34

My mom told me yesterday that Paul Newman had massive problems with alcohol. I was somewhat skeptical, so this morning I asked ChatGPT a very simple question: "Is Paul Newman known for having had problems with alcohol?" All of the models up to o3-mini-high told me he had no known problems. Here's o3-mini-high's response: "Paul Newman is not widely known for having had problems with alcohol. While he portrayed charact…

I asked GPT-4.5 and it searched the web and immediately gave me a "yes" with paragraphs of sources cited.

3-4 hours is enough time for It to have crawled the hacker news comments section. That's about the frequency the AI bots crawl my little out of the way blog.

Re: Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit

#166

Post by pbronez »

aerhardt wrote: post #34

My mom told me yesterday that Paul Newman had massive problems with alcohol. I was somewhat skeptical, so this morning I asked ChatGPT a very simple question: "Is Paul Newman known for having had problems with alcohol?" All of the models up to o3-mini-high told me he had no known problems. Here's o3-mini-high's response: "Paul Newman is not widely known for having had problems with alcohol. While he portrayed charact…

Testing the query on Kagi

# Quick Answer

Yes, Paul Newman struggled with alcohol. His issues with alcohol were explored in the HBO Max documentary, The Last Movie Stars, and Shawn Levy's biography, Paul Newman: A Life. According to a posthumous memoir, Newman was tormented by self-doubt and insecurities and questioned his acting ability. His struggles with alcohol led to a brief separation from Joanne Woodward, though it had nothing to do with cheating.

(4x Source footnotes omitted for readability)

# Ki Multi-step Research Assistant

Paul Newman is known to have struggled with alcohol. According to his posthumous memoir, Newman candidly discussed his issues with drinking and self-doubt, describing himself as an alcoholic who was tormented by insecurities[^1][^2]. He reportedly drank a significant amount of beer daily and later moved on to stronger drinks like Scotch[^3][^4]. His drinking habits were a notable part of his life, and he was often identified by his beer drinking[^5][^6]. Despite these struggles, Newman was also recognized for his generosity and devotion to his family[^7].

[^1]: [Posthumous memoir reveals Paul Newman's struggle with alcohol](https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/films/1688113/paul-n...) [^2]: [Review: Paul Newman memoir stuns with brutal honesty - AP News](https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-reviews-movies-paul...) [^3]: [Was Paul Newman Really an Alcoholic? - The Cinemaholic](https://thecinemaholic.com/was-paul-newman-really-an-alcohol...) [^4]: [Who Paul Newman Was—and Who He Wanted to Be](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/24/who-paul-newma...) [^5]: [Paul Newman's Beer Drinking - Psychology Today](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/addiction-in-society...) [^6]: [Paul Newman's Beer Drinking | Psychology Today United Kingdom](https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/addiction-in-society...) [^7]: [The troubled life of Paul Newman | The Spectator](https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-troubled-life-of-pau...)

Re: Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit

#167

Post by crvdgc »

> But in recent months I've spoken to other YC founders doing AI application startups [...] in different industries, on different problem sets.

Maybe they should create a benchmark collectively called YC founders. Gather various test cases. Never make it public. And use that to evaluate newly released models.

Re: Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit

#168

Post by root_axis »

bglazer wrote: post #156
InkCanon wrote: post #75

The biggest story in AI was released a few weeks ago but was given little attention: on the recent USAMO, SOTA models scored on average 5% (IIRC, it was some abysmal number). This is despite them supposedly having gotten 50%, 60% etc performance on IMO questions. This massively suggests AI models simply remember the past results, instead of actually solving these questions. I'm incredibly surprised no one mentions th…

Yeah I’m a computational biology researcher. I’m working on a novel machine learning approach to inferring cellular behavior. I’m currently stumped why my algorithm won’t converge. So, I describe the mathematics to ChatGPT-o3-mini-high to try to help reason about what’s going on. It was almost completely useless. Like blog-slop “intro to ML” solutions and ideas. It ignores all the mathematical context, and zeros in o…

It's funny, I have the same problem all the time with typical day to day programming roadblocks that these models are supposed to excel at. I'm talking about any type of bug or unexpected behavior that requires even 5 minutes of deeper analysis.

Sometimes when I'm anxious just to get on with my original task, I'll paste the code and output/errors into the LLM and iterate over its solutions, but the experience is like rolling dice, cycling through possible solutions without any kind of deductive analysis that might bring it gradually closer to a solution. If I keep asking, it eventually just starts cycling through variants of previous answers with solutions that contradict the established logic of the error/output feedback up to this point.

Not to say that the LLMs aren't productive tools, but they're more like calculators of language than agents that reason.

Re: Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit

#169

Post by aunty_helen »

lukev wrote: post #40

This is a bit of a meta-comment, but reading through the responses to a post like this is really interesting because it demonstrates how our collective response to this stuff is (a) wildly divergent and (b) entirely anecdote-driven. I have my own opinions, but I can't really say that they're not also based on anecdotes and personal decision-making heuristics. But some of us are going to end up right and some of us ar…

That’s a good point, the comments section is very anecdotal. Do you have any data to say if this is a common occurrence or specific to this topic?

Re: Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit

#170

Post by adelpozo »

aerhardt wrote: post #34

My mom told me yesterday that Paul Newman had massive problems with alcohol. I was somewhat skeptical, so this morning I asked ChatGPT a very simple question: "Is Paul Newman known for having had problems with alcohol?" All of the models up to o3-mini-high told me he had no known problems. Here's o3-mini-high's response: "Paul Newman is not widely known for having had problems with alcohol. While he portrayed charact…

I can’t reproduce. Maybe others reported the error and someone adjusted the expected answer, I do not know enough about OpenAI operations to say for sure.

The reason this bothers me is that comments like this reinforce the believes of people that could otherwise find value in these tools.

But I think points like this would be better made in shared chats or screenshots, since we do not have something like a core dump or stacktrace to attach.

And while I am not saying OP did this, I have seen technically skilled engineers asserting/implying that llm/chatbots aren’t good or not useful to them look at their chat log that a multitude of topics that I am sure would impact the result of the query.

Yes. It can be an UX problem. Yes. It can be an algorithmc problem. But they are just tools that can be used wrong and not a perfect mechanical brain.

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