[threeducks]

FWIW, I asked gpt-oss-120b this question 10 times and the answer was always "sauce", "sane" or "sale". I also tried different temperatures (from 0 to 1), which did not seem to have an effect on the correctness of the answer.

EDIT: I now have also questioned the smaller gpt-oss-20b (free) 10 times via OpenRouter (default settings, provider was AtlasCloud) and the answers were: sage, sane, sane, space, sane, sane, sane, sane, space, sane.

You are either very unlucky, your configuration is suboptimal (weird system prompt perhaps?) or there is some bug in whichever system you are using for inference.

[yunusabd]

GP asked the model to _create_ a riddle, not solve a given one.

[threeducks]

Yes, but the odds of getting GPT-OSS to respond with that riddle are pretty low and it is not necessary to demonstrate whether the LLM can answer the riddle correctly.

[vidarh]

They said it provided the answer when it created the riddle. They didn't question itd ability to solve it.