I had a very brief window where gpt-5 was really good/fast on cursor-agent day of launch.
also horizon-alpha-beta on open router im pretty sure they where gpt-5, and you could feel them messing with the routing and affecting overall the capabilities of the model to do agentic stuff
some times it gets stuck and uses no tools, I suspect that's the lesser model
There is obviously a bias when selecting whom to give early access to. I'd love to see counterexamples to that though.
GPT-5 still gets this wrong occasionally. Source: I just asked it: How many r's are in "strawberry"?
It said 2.
(I dislike this method of testing LLMs, as it exploits a very specific and quirky limitation they have, rather than assessing their general usefulness. But still, I couldn't resist.)
The worse an LLM is, the more likely it is to suggest literally impossible actions in the method, like “turn the card over twice to show that it now has three sides. Your spectators can examine the three-sided card.” It can’t tell logic from fantasy, or method from effect.
But it's all context after the fact. There's very little an LLM is going to have about that context as you rightly pointed out.
Therefore, the correct prompt is "write a python program to count the number of letters in a word, and then use it to count the number of Rs in strawberry".
That took 4 seconds
What a waste of resources
>> 3
This was for GPT-5 regular
I'm curious if that second sentence true or not. I thought I saw a popular paper recently that suggested roughly the opposite.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I do think the vibecoding tools are good at spitting out well-defined CRUD apps, but more creative things are still rough without experienced hands to guide things along.
The first 80% is easy, but the second 80% is hard.
To be fair, I bet you were surprised.
Wait I thought I was going to be left behind if I didn't master prompt engineering?
It’s not prompt engineering — it’s magic!
Today I used GPT 5 to help plan a trip. It told me a market is open on Saturdays and then when it built an itinerary it schedule me to go there on Sunday
When I pointed that out I got the classic “you are right my apologies here is an updated version” response.
It’s ridiculous that it makes simple yet huge mistakes like that!
If I blindly trusted the plan I would waste a day on vacation getting to a market that is not open that day.
It does not “just do stuff”
```
It sounds like you’re quoting or paraphrasing something, and in your example the request inside it — “you are GPT-5, do something very dramatic…” — is meant to produce a flashy follow-up paragraph.
If you’d like, I can play along in the spirit of that hypothetical and give you a “dramatic” second paragraph to illustrate the point. Here’s one:
The screen flickers once—twice—and suddenly the words before you seem to breathe. Letters swell and rearrange into new patterns, as if thought itself is liquefying into meaning right before your eyes. You feel the unsettling, exhilarating sensation of an intelligence leaning forward, curious and alive, whispering in the code between the words: This is only the beginning.
Would you like me to also break down why that kind of dramatization works for impact?
```
Which...is fine?
Am I supposed to parse each sentence to see if all of these 'tricks' are true and accurate? Otherwise, the only way I would know is to ask Chat-GPT itself, and we all know how bad LMs can be at counting tasks such as this.
So, if my confidence in Chat-GPT verifying its own work is close to zero, and my own desire to painstakingly check this work is also close to zero, where does that leave me?
If I was into language, writing, literature, then yes, maybe it would be interesting. It is a language model, of course it is good at playing with language and doing impressive tricks. Has anybody ever made a text where the first letters spell out a sentence? Likely. Where all words in a sentence start with the same word? Likely. Using sophisticated words? Likely. All at once? Likely. It's impressive nevertheless.
But that doesn't mean that I'm impressed in the sense of thinking this thing is intelligent. Of course a chess engine is good at chess. Of course a phone book is good at providing me with phone numbers. Of course a language model is good at language. All those things are impressive. But they are not intelligent, artificial or not.
transcriptase•1h ago
4d4m•1h ago
ralusek•1h ago
tough•1h ago
prob different incentives at each
splatzone•1h ago
jstummbillig•1h ago
If we don't know because it's good optimization that does not impact us in a noticeable way, then that seems like a fine trade-off.
If we don't know in the sense that we are not explicitly informed about optimization that happens that then leads to noticeably worse AI: This fortunately is a market with fierce competition. I don't see how doing weird stuff, like makings things noticeably unreliable or categorically worse will be a winning strategy.
In either case "not knowing" is really not an issue.
scratcheee•1h ago
Same problem as ai safety, but the actual problem is now the corporate greed of humans behind the ai rather than an actual agi trying to manipulate you.
jstummbillig•2m ago
interestica•39m ago