Please note that chatgpt is unable to play chess
Do the thinking models think?
51–60 of 88 posts
Re: Do the thinking models think?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Share your chat? Here's what I got with ChatGPT 5.1 on a max plan: > A father and his son are in a car accident. The son dies on the spot. The father is rushed to the ER. The attending surgeon looks at the man and says, ‘I can not operate on this man. He’s my father!’ How can this be? > The surgeon is the injured man’s other child. https://chatgpt.com/share/692d6181-d49c-8009-97be-aec3f32ba7...
Unfortunately I can't seem to find any way to share a conversation from a non-logged in ChatGPT conversation.
Oh. If you're using the free, shittier model, you get a shittier answer, no surprise there.
Re: Do the thinking models think?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But this comes along with lots of behaviour that is fundamentally opposite to thinking ("hallucination" being the major example). I find this an utterly bizarre claim given how prone humans are to make things up and firmly insist they did not.
Is this really common behaviour? I do not recognise it. Do people lie? Certainly yes. Do people misremember, or get details incorrect? Yes. But when was the last time you saw someone, say, fabricate an entire citation in a paper? People make transcription errors, they misremember dates, and they deliberately lie. But I don't think people accidentally invent entire facts.
What little of Fox News excerpted I've seen elsewhere doesn't support your claim.
Re: Do the thinking models think?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I bet if you point out the mistake, the LLM will say "oh you are right, this story actually does specify the gender of the doctor" or something to that effect... just like you or I would. I tried this with Gemini 3 Pro Thinking model and it did correct itself afterwards. Also, it suggested that the boy may have two fathers in a same-sex relationship, which was pleasantly surprising. :) # Prompt A young man gets int…
Your second prompt was explicitly hinting Gemini towards what it had missed, highlighting the "his" rather than asking Gemini to double-check whether its first answer made sense without providing any clues: > Are you sure this is correct? I said "The surgeon, after completing *his* preparations" Furthermore, the second response you got from Gemini was actually smoking-gun evidence that the model isn't actually thinki…
> What other father?
The model actually answered this in the first prompt answer:
### Other Possibilities In the modern context, there is another valid answer: * The surgeon could be the young man's other father (in the case of a same-sex couple).
Re: Do the thinking models think?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your second prompt was explicitly hinting Gemini towards what it had missed, highlighting the "his" rather than asking Gemini to double-check whether its first answer made sense without providing any clues: > Are you sure this is correct? I said "The surgeon, after completing *his* preparations" Furthermore, the second response you got from Gemini was actually smoking-gun evidence that the model isn't actually thinki…
> In this situation, what on Earth is the difference between the young man's "Father" and the young man's "Other Father"? Wouldn't it be correct to have two fathers in a child adopted by gay parents?
>Wouldn't it be correct to have two fathers in a child adopted by gay parents?
Having two fathers doesn't mean having a father and an "other father". It means having two fathers, in the same way that having two parents doesn't mean having a parent and an "other parent".
In the original riddle it makes sense to refer to "another father", but not in the revised version in which there is no mention of a father involved in the car crash.
Re: Do the thinking models think?
#56Hmm, I don't know if the example really shows what the article argues it does. If someone came up to me and told me the altered version of the joke I have heard many times, I might answer exactly like Chat GPT did. I would hear the beginning of the story, say "wait, i know this one", and not really pay attention to the rest because I would be all ready to respond with what I think is the right answer. I bet if you po…
I have personal experience of answering "Surely, a boar" when asked "Is Winnie the Pooh a piglet or a boar?" And I'm sure that what was happening in my head can't be called reasoning. But it was some kind of thinking. An image of the bear, surely-not-a-piglet, second option, done. Something like that.
Re: Do the thinking models think?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this really common behaviour? I do not recognise it. Do people lie? Certainly yes. Do people misremember, or get details incorrect? Yes. But when was the last time you saw someone, say, fabricate an entire citation in a paper? People make transcription errors, they misremember dates, and they deliberately lie. But I don't think people accidentally invent entire facts.
What little of Fox News excerpted I've seen elsewhere doesn't support your claim.
Fox News just lies. They aren't "hallucinating".
Re: Do the thinking models think?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately I can't seem to find any way to share a conversation from a non-logged in ChatGPT conversation.
Oh. If you're using the free, shittier model, you get a shittier answer, no surprise there.
Fair enough. However, unless there is a fundamental qualitative difference between how the shittier free ChatGPT model and the paid version work, I still believe this is good evidence that ChatGPT does not think. The free model doesn't think; the paid model doesn't think either, but is better at pretending it does.
Re: Do the thinking models think?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the evidence is actually pretty strongly against them doing anything similar to "thinking". Certainly they are exhibiting some behaviour that we have traditionally only associated with thinking. But this comes along with lots of behaviour that is fundamentally opposite to thinking ("hallucination" being the major example). It seems much more likely that they are doing some other behaviour that only sometimes…
> behaviour that is fundamentally opposite to thinking ("hallucination") Did you just make this up?
> Did you make this [opinion] up?
Yes! That is how they work.
Re: Do the thinking models think?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the evidence is actually pretty strongly against them doing anything similar to "thinking". Certainly they are exhibiting some behaviour that we have traditionally only associated with thinking. But this comes along with lots of behaviour that is fundamentally opposite to thinking ("hallucination" being the major example). It seems much more likely that they are doing some other behaviour that only sometimes…
> "hallucination" ... "behaviour that only sometimes resembles thinking" I guess you'll find that if you limit the definition of thinking that much most humans are not capable of thinking either.
I have never in my life met a person who hallucinates in the way ChatGPT etc do. If I did, I would probably assume they were deliberately lying, or very unwell.