alt Hacker NewsRight now, 30 seconds ago, I asked ChatGPT to tell me about a book I found that was written in the 60s.
It made up the entire description. When I pointed this out, it apologized and then made up another description.
The idea that this is going to lead to superintelligence in a few years is absolutely nonsense.
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The other day I asked Claude Opus 4.6 one of my favorite trivia pieces:
What plural English word for an animal shares no letters with its singular form? Collective nouns (flock, herd, school, etc.) don't count.
Claude responded with:
"The answer is geese -- the plural of cow."
Though, to be fair, in the next paragraph of the response, Claude stated the correct answer. So, it went off the rails a bit, but self-corrected at least. Nevertheless, I got a bit of a chuckle out of its confidence in its first answer.
I asked GPT 5.2 the same question and it nailed the answer flawlessly. I wouldn't extrapolate much about the model quality based on this answer, but I thought it was interesting still.
(For those curious, the answer is 'kine' (archaic plural for cow).
Is that because this book is obscure and no human has yet written a description that could be scraped?