[ileonichwiesz]

Of course it’s important to remember that the ability of an LLM to answer an obscure riddle like that has nothing to do with its reasoning abilities, but rather depends on whether the answer was included in its training dataset.

[hirvi74]

The word is in most online dictionaries for what it is worth. It's also used in Biblical texts, albeit only a handful of times. I do agree it's not a true assessment of an LLM's overall reasoning. No person I have ever asked that riddle to has gotten it correct. Then again, that is probably partly the point of the riddle.

I would like to reiterate that both Claude and GPT answered correctly. It was just bizarre how Claude got a initial, minor detail incorrect, but reasoned enough to get the more difficult answer correct.

[i_think_so]

I think the point here is that an LLM might not get the correct answer because it hasn't found it yet by scraping Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc. Artificially limit the training set and it will never, ever get it right.

Whereas, a human of average intelligence, in possession of a dictionary or perhaps just a list of animals, could reason their way through getting the correct answer in finite time. They could probably get it without the list if they really wanted to.

[i_think_so]

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! As recently as yesterday I was forced to abandon a conversation with a normie because I couldn't convince her of this fundamental limitation. ChatGPT was "damn near magical" in her opinion. Sigh.

Is it time to update the laws? [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws