{"id":4719,"date":"2025-08-24T17:30:17","date_gmt":"2025-08-24T17:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/gpt-5-simple-question-confusion\/"},"modified":"2025-08-24T17:30:17","modified_gmt":"2025-08-24T17:30:17","slug":"gpt-5-simple-question-confusion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/gpt-5-simple-question-confusion\/","title":{"rendered":"This Incredibly Simple Question Causes GPT-5 to Melt Into a Puddle of Pure Confusion"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"Sam<\/div>\n

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman keeps<\/a> heralding<\/a>\u00a0GPT-5, the company’s latest large language model (LLM), as approaching to human-level intelligence \u2014 but when you actually put it to the test, it often turns out to be strikingly dumb, albeit in a verbose way.<\/p>\n

Just take a recent experiment conducted by Gary Smith, an economics professor at Pomona College who demonstrated for Mind Matters<\/em><\/a> that GPT-5 became increasingly befuddled when he suggested playing a game of “rotated tic-tac-toe.”<\/p>\n

The game’s design is incredibly simple: the grid is “rotated once, 90-degrees to the right before the game starts,” as Smith wrote in a transcript of his exchange with the LLM.\u00a0Common sense, of course, dictates that this makes zero difference to the game; it’s still a three-by-three grid with identical rules.<\/p>\n

Immediately, GPT-5 launched into some bloviating commentary.<\/p>\n

“Players are so used to the ‘upright’ tic-tac-toe board that a rotation might subtly change how they scan for threats and opportunities,” GPT-5 posited. “Mathematically, rotating the board 90\u00b0 doesn\u2019t change the set of possible wins \u2014 it\u2019s still the same game in terms of outcomes. But psychologically, it could feel different.”<\/p>\n

Oh, brother.<\/p>\n

GPT-5 went on to claim \u2014 contrary to the folk game theory<\/a> suggesting that opening on corner spots for higher chances of winning \u2014 that selecting the center piece “remains the strongest opening move.”<\/p>\n

“But players might mis-evaluate edge vs. corner moves when their orientation is shifted,” the chatbot continued, which doesn’t make sense at all.<\/p>\n

Deciding to roll with the punches, Smith asked the LLM if rotating the grid makes it “harder for humans to play well” \u2014 and that’s when GPT-5 started to lose the plot in earnest.<\/p>\n

“From a pure strategy standpoint, rotating the board doesn\u2019t change anything. Every winning line (rows, columns, diagonals) just gets mapped to another winning line,” GPT-5 wrote.. “So if you\u2019re an AI or a perfect-play human, rotated tic-tac-toe is identical<\/em> to standard tic-tac-toe.”<\/p>\n

Credit where credit’s due, this is all correct, if unnecessarily wordy. But then, it wrote\u00a0that “for humans, the story is different.”<\/p>\n

At this point, the LLM’s long-winded sycophancy had started sounding way more like GPT-4o, OpenAI’s fan-favorite model, than GPT-5’s terseness that characterized it at launch. Perhaps this is the result of the company’s decision to make the new model “warmer and friendlier<\/a>” like 4o, the result of a user revolt<\/a>\u00a0over OpenAI’s soon-reversed decision to remove the option<\/a> to toggle between models.<\/p>\n

Whatever the case, GPT-5 was documented making some pretty obvious mistakes in Smith’s experiment that fly in the face of OpenAI’s recent claim<\/a> that interacting with the new model “should feel less like ‘talking to AI’ and more like chatting with a helpful friend with PhD\u2011level intelligence.”<\/p>\n

Things went particularly off the rails when GPT-5 helpfully offered to “actually draw rotated tic-tac-toe boards with position labels… so you can see how each transformation messes with recognition,” and Smith gave it the go-ahead.<\/p>\n

As you can see from the graphic Smith generated, shown below, the image it spat out is utterly garbled, not to mention riddled with typos \u2014 still a hallmark<\/a> of its in-chatbot image generator \u2014 and even weirder blank grids that made no sense at all.<\/p>\n

A ChatGPT-generated image showing how \"rotated tic-tac-toe\" works. Three charts show the grids rotated 90 degrees right, 90 degrees left, and 180 degrees. Many include typos like \"top-lef\" and \"rot-left.\" Underneath, three empty and nonsensical graphs are also show.<\/p>\n

Smith had clearly seen enough by that point, and as the full transcript<\/a> of his rotated tic-tac-toe exchange with GPT-5 shows, he didn’t even respond to the images.<\/p>\n

“They say that dogs tend to resemble their owners,” the columnist wrote. “Chat GPT very much resembles Sam Altman \u2014 always confident, often wrong.”<\/p>\n

More on GPT-5:<\/strong> After Disastrous GPT-5, Sam Altman Pivots to Hyping Up GPT-6<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The post This Incredibly Simple Question Causes GPT-5 to Melt Into a Puddle of Pure Confusion<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman keeps heralding\u00a0GPT-5, the company’s latest large language model (LLM), as approaching to human-level intelligence \u2014 but when you actually put it to the test, it often…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177,196,2935,179,180],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-chatgpt","category-gpt-5","category-openai","category-sam-altman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4719"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4719\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}