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.
I find it bizarre that people find these obvious cases to prove the tech is worthless. Like saying cars are worthless because they can’t go under water.
Not bizarre at all.
The point isn’t “they can’t do word games therefore they’re useless”, it’s “if this thing is so easily tripped up on the most trivial shit that a 6-year-old can figure out, don’t be going round claiming it has PhD level expertise”, or even “don’t be feeding its unreliable bullshit to me at the top of every search result”.
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.Illinois contains a hidden D which is in your mom.
I didn’t understand your comment, so I asked the same LLM as before.
It explained it and I think that I get it now. Low-grade middle-school-“Your Mom”-joke, is it? Ha-ha… 🙄This also means that AI did better than myself at both tasks I’ve given it today (I found only 9 states with “d” when going over the state-list myself…).
Whatever. I’m gonna have second lunch now.
A public proclamation of your ineptitude at simple tasks is an interesting way of defending the utility of LLMs.
In all fairness, that is one of the strong use cases for computers in general. Doing simple yet tedious tasks accurately. When looking over 50 names checking for a particular letter, humans get bored and make mistakes. We actually aren’t great at that sort of task. I think simply calling this ineptitude both misses the point and under appreciates the reality of being human.
Alas, it is easier to call someone dumb than to try to understand them.
