this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
1 points (100.0% liked)
TechTakes
1812 readers
26 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm kinda tired, but this puzzle's shoved itself into my brain. The obvious solution I can see is, roughly speaking:
Take the duck and carrot across
Take the duck back
Take the duck and potato across
Yeah, exactly. There's no trick to it at all, unlike the original puzzle.
I also tested OpenAI's offerings a few months back with similarly nonsensical results: https://awful.systems/post/1769506
All-vegetables no duck variant is solved correctly now, but I doubt it is due to improved reasoning as such, I think they may have augmented the training data with some variants of the river crossing. The river crossing is one of the top most known puzzles, and various people have been posting hilarious bot failures with variants of it. So it wouldn't be unexpected that their training data augmentation has river crossing variants.
Of course, there's very many ways in which the puzzle can be modified, and their augmentation would only cover obvious stuff like variation on what items can be left with what items or spots on the boat.
It's just overtrained on the puzzle such that it mostly ignores your prompt. Changing a few words out doesn't change that it recognises the puzzle. Try writing it out in ASCII or uploading an image with it written or some other weird way that it hasn't been specifically trained on and I bet it actually performs better.
Not really. Here's the chain-of-word-vomit that led to the answers:
https://pastebin.com/HQUExXkX
Note that in "its impossible" answer it correctly echoes that you can take one other item with you, and does not bring the duck back (while the old overfitted gpt4 obsessively brought items back), while in the duck + 3 vegetables variant, it has a correct answer in the wordvomit, but not being an AI enthusiast it can't actually choose the correct answer (a problem shared with the monkeys on typewriters).
I'd say it clearly isn't ignoring the prompt or differences from the original river crossings. It just can't actually reason, and the problem requires a modicum of reasoning, much as unloading groceries from a car does.