Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by wat10000 568 days ago
Gemini got this right and also wrong. It gave me two possibilities, one of which is the correct answer, and the other is a complete nonsense answer about the surgeon also being the woman’s son.

I tried again and it gave three possibilities: the surgeon is the father, the surgeon is the mother, the surgeon is an uncle or cousin. Kind of bizarre, but not just pattern matching on the riddle as ChatGPT and Claude did for me.

1 comments

This is actually why I don't use Gemini. I've notice that it gets nonsensical when it gets into what I assume is sparser latency space. Claude and ChatGPT will stay coherent/consistent within the context of what they're saying (even if wrong). Worse, when Gemini starts doing this, it seems mostly irrecoverable, like the "nonsense" poisons the context window.
I suppose that nonsense in the training data is often accompanied by yet more nonsense, so that’s what it might be trained to emit.