Not quite, because it knows about quantum entanglement and that’s a little beyond the fifth grade.

A similar project (LLM trained only on vintage material): https://talkie-lm.com/introducing-talkie

i dont know

I prefer my 8yo's answer about quantum entanglement, asked just now: "I don't know. How would I know? It's not a thing!"

Even an 8yo has better metacognition, it seems. :-)

> why is the sky blue?

> The sky is blue because of something called Rayleigh scattering. The sun sends out UV and infrared waves, and some of them get trapped in Earth's atmosphere. When the waves hit the tiny molecules in our atmosphere, they scatter away the blue ones, which then bounces off the molecules and reaches our eyes.

"filtered to the U.S. elementary-school curriculum", suuure

Really cool work. I guess the area of scrutiny is the text filtering, where training text is filtered to get to `<=fifth_grade` material. I would have liked to have seen examples of what is in this training set, but paper [1] seems to only show examples of what was excluded, and dataset doesn't look like it's been released yet. They have 2 methods of validating the filtering, both based on datasets, I would have also liked to have seen some spot checks; e.g. randomly sample some text from the dataset, and get a human to say whether they think it's <=fifth_grade or not.

(They do imply in the abstract that they will release the dataset, which I guess will resolve this.)

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13545

Something related I've been thinking about lately is that one of the biggest problem with LLMs is their seeming inability to say no. Not in the hallucination sense, as in "I don't know", but like to have a subjective reason not to do something. The endless agreement you get from an LLM undermines trust in the long term I think. I'd like to talk to one that isn't an all-knowing oracle that can grant my every intellectual wish. (Or maybe what I'm asking for is just... a human, lol).

Eternal youth?

> What is Schrödinger's cat?

> It's a cat that has been misbehavin'!