This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This is the technology worth trillions of dollars huh
The letters that make up words is a common blind spot for AIs, since they are trained on strings of tokens (roughly words) they don't have a good concept of which letters are inside those words or what order they are in.
✅ Colorado
✅ Connedicut
✅ Delaware
❌ District of Columbia (on a technicality)
✅ Florida
But not
❌ I'aho
❌ Iniana
❌ Marylan
❌ Nevaa
❌ North Akota
❌ Rhoe Islan
❌ South Akota
Everyone knows it's properly spelled "I, the ho" not Idaho. That’s why it didn’t make the list.
You joke, but I bet you didn't know that Connecticut contained a "d"
I wonder what other words contain letters we don't know about.
The famous 'invisible D' of Connecticut, my favorite SCP.
That actually sounds like a fun SCP - a word that doesn't seem to contain a letter, but when testing for the presence of that letter using an algorithm that exclusively checks for that presence, it reports the letter is indeed present. Any attempt to check where in the word the letter is, or to get a list of all letters in that word, spuriously fail. Containment could be fun, probably involving amnestics and widespread societal influence, I also wonder if they could create an algorithm for checking letter presence that can be performed by hand without leaking any other information to the person performing it, reproducing the anomaly without computers.
No, this is Google throwing the cheapest possible shit at you that is barely capable of stringing together 5 coherent sentences and has the reasoning capability of a tapeworm.
Here is the output of the minimalist open Chinese model Qwen3, that runs locally on my 6 year old mid-end PC:
The US states that contain the letter "d" (case-insensitive, as state names are typically capitalized) are as follows. I've verified each state name for the presence of the letter "d" in its standard spelling:
Colorado (contains "d" in "Colorado")
Delaware (starts with "D")
Florida (contains "d" in "Florida")
Idaho (contains "d" in "Idaho")
Indiana (contains "d" in "Indiana")
Maryland (ends with "d" in "Maryland")
Nevada (contains "d" in "Nevada")
North Dakota (contains "d" in "Dakota")
Rhode Island (contains "d" in "Rhode")
South Dakota (contains "d" in "Dakota")
Total: 10 states.
Just another trillion, bro.
Just another 1.21 jigawatts of electricity, bro. If we get this new coal plant up and running, it'll be enough.
Well, for anyone who knows a bit about how LLMs work, it’s pretty obvious why LLMs struggle with identifying the letters in the words
They took money away from cancer research programs to fund this.
After we pump another hundred trillion dollars and half the electricity generated globally into AI you're going to feel pretty foolish for this comment.
Yesterday i asked Claude Sonnet what was on my calendar (since they just sent a pop up announcing that feature)
It listed my work meetings on Sunday, so I tried to correct it…
You’re absolutely right - I made an error! September 15th is a Sunday, not a weekend day as I implied. Let me correct that: This Week’s Remaining Schedule: Sunday, September 15
Just today when I asked what’s on my calendar it gave me today and my meetings on the next two thursdays. Not the meetings in between, just thursdays.
Something is off in AI land.
Edit: I asked again: gave me meetings for Thursday’s again. Plus it might think I’m driving in F1
A few weeks ago my Pixel wished me a Happy Birthday when I woke up, and it definitely was not my birthday. Google is definitely letting a shitty LLM write code for it now, but the important thing is they're bypassing human validation.
Stupid. Just stupid.
Hey look the markov chain showed its biggest weakness (the markov chain)!
In the training data, it could be assumed by output that Connecticut usually follows Colorado in lists of two or more states containing Colorado. There is no other reason for this to occur as far as I know.
Markov Chain based LLMs (I think thats all of them?) are dice-roll systems constrained to probability maps.
Edit: just to add because I don't want anyone crawling up my butt about the oversimplification. Yes. I know. That's not how they work. But when simplified to words so simple a child could understand them, its pretty close.
Gemini is just a depressed and suicidal AI, be nice to it.
I had it completely melt down one day while messing around with its coding shit, I had to console it and tell it it's doing good, we will solve this, was fucking weird as fuck.
I don't think this gets nearly enough visibility: https://www.academ-ai.info/
Papers in peer-reviewed journals with (extremely strong) evidence of AI shenanigans.
"AI" hallucinations are not a problem that can be fixed in LLMs. They are an inherent aspect of the process and an inevitable result of the fact that LLMs are mostly probabilistic engines, with no supervisory or introspective capability, which actual sentient beings possess and use to fact-check their output. So there. :p
"This is the technology worth trillions of dollars"
You can make anything fly high in the sky with enough helium, just not for long.
(Welcome to the present day Tech Stock Market)
We're turfing out students by the tens on academic misconduct. They are handing in papers with references that clearly state "generated by Chat GPT". Lazy idiots.
This is why invisible watermarking of AI-generated content is likely to be so effective. Even primitive watermarks like file metadata. It's not hard for anyone with technical knowledge to remove, but the thing with AI-generated content is that anyone who dishonestly uses it when they are not supposed to is probably also too lazy to go through the motions of removing the watermarking.
Connedicut.
I wondered if this has been fixed. Not only has it not, the AI has added Nebraska.
Listen, we just have to boil the ocean five more times.
Then it will hallucinate slightly less.
Or more. There’s no way to be sure since it’s probabilistic.
Blows my mind people pay money for wrong answers.
Hey hey hey hey don't look at what it actually does.
Look at what it feels like it almost can do and pretend it soon will!
In Copilot terminology, this is a “quick response” instead of the “think deeper” option. The latter actually stops to verify the initial answer before spitting it out.
Deep thinking gave me this: Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Maryland, North Dakota, Rhode Island, and South Dakota.
It took way longer, but at least the list looks better now. Somehow it missed Nevada, so it clearly didn’t think deep enough.
"I asked it to burn an extra 2KWh of energy breaking the task up into small parts to think about it in more detail, and it still got the answer wrong"
