It seems to me that there’s no way to achieve AGI with the current LLM approach. New releases have small improvements, live we’re hitting some kind of plateau. And I say this a a heavy LLM user. Don’t fire your employees just yet.
GPT-5
471–480 of 1001 posts
Re: GPT-5
#472ChatGPT5 in this demo: > For an airplane wing (airfoil), the top surface is curved and the bottom is flatter. When the wing moves forward: > * Air over the top has to travel farther in the same amount of time -> it moves faster -> pressure on the top decreases. > * Air underneath moves slower -> pressure underneath is higher > * The presure difference creates an upward force - lift Isn't that explanation of why wings…
You're right - this is the "equal transit time" fallacy; lift is primarily generated by the wing deflecting air downward (Newton's Third Law) and the pressure distribution resulting from airflow curvature around the wing.
Re: GPT-5
#473GPT-5 knowledge cutoff: Sep 30, 2024 (10 months before release). Compare that to Gemini 2.5 Pro knowledge cutoff: Jan 2025 (3 months before release) Claude Opus 4.1: knowledge cutoff: Mar 2025 (4 months before release) https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/compare https://deepmind.google/models/gemini/pro/ https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/about-claude/models/overv...
with web search, is knowledge cutoff really relevant anymore? Or is this more of a comment on how long it took them to do post-training?
It still is, not all queries trigger web search, and it takes more tokens and time to do research. ChatGPT will confidently give me outdated information, and unless I know it’s wrong and ask it to research, it wouldn’t know it is wrong. Having a more recent knowledge base can be very useful (for example, knowing who the president is without looking it up, making references to newer node versions instead of old ones)
Re: GPT-5
#474Are others currently able to use GPT-5 yet? It doesn't seem to be available on my account, despite the messaging.
Re: GPT-5
#475I had preview access for a couple of weeks. I've written up my initial notes so far, focusing on core model characteristics, pricing (extremely competitive) and lessons from the model card (aka as little hype as possible): https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/7/gpt-5/
This post seems far more marketing-y than your previous posts, which have a bit more criticality to them (such as your Gemini 2.5 blog post here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/17/gemini-2-5/). You seem to gloss over a lot of GPT-5's shortcomings and spend more time hyping it than other posts. Is there some kind of conflict of interest happening?
Re: GPT-5
#476Is this US only release as I'm not seeing it in the UK ?
Re: GPT-5
#477Very funny. The very first answer it gave to illustrate its "Expert knowledge" is quite common, and it's wrong.
What's even funnier is that you can find why on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift_(force)#False_explanation...
What's terminally funny is that in the visualisation app, it used a symmetric wing, which of course wouldn't generate lift according to its own explanation (as the travelled distance and hence air flow speed would be the same).
I work as a game physics programmer, so I noticed that immediately and almost laughed.
I watched only that part so far while I was still at the office, though.
Re: GPT-5
#478It is frequently suggested that once one of the AI companies reaches an AGI threshold, they will take off ahead of the rest. It's interesting to note that at least so far, the trend has been the opposite: as time goes on and the models get better, the performance of the different company's gets clustered closer together. Right now GPT-5, Claude Opus, Grok 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro all seem quite good across the board (ie the…
Well said. It’s clearly plateauing. It could be a localised plateau, or something more fundamental. Time will tell.
Re: GPT-5
#479It is frequently suggested that once one of the AI companies reaches an AGI threshold, they will take off ahead of the rest. It's interesting to note that at least so far, the trend has been the opposite: as time goes on and the models get better, the performance of the different company's gets clustered closer together. Right now GPT-5, Claude Opus, Grok 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro all seem quite good across the board (ie the…
Perhaps it is not possible to simulate higher-level intelligence using a stochastic model for predicting text. I am not an AI researcher, but I have friends who do work in the field, and they are not worried about LLM-based AGI because of the diminishing returns on results vs amount of training data required. Maybe this is the bottleneck. Human intelligence is markedly different from LLMs: it requires far fewer examp…
True. At a minimum, as long as LLMs don't include some kind of more strict representation of the world, they will fail in a lot of tasks. Hallucinations -- responding with a prediction that doesn't make any sense in the context of the response -- are still a big problem. Because LLMs never really develop rules about the world.
For example, while you can get it to predict good chess moves if you train it on enough chess games, it can't really constrain itself to the rules of chess. (https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/generative-ais-crippling-a...)
Re: GPT-5
#480It is frequently suggested that once one of the AI companies reaches an AGI threshold, they will take off ahead of the rest. It's interesting to note that at least so far, the trend has been the opposite: as time goes on and the models get better, the performance of the different company's gets clustered closer together. Right now GPT-5, Claude Opus, Grok 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro all seem quite good across the board (ie the…
I think part of this is due to the AI craze no longer being in the wildest west possible. Investors, or at least heads of companies believe in this as a viable economic engine so they are properly investing in what's there. Or at least, the hype hasn't slapped them in the face just yet.