Oh man, if you want to see a thinking model lose its mind... write a list of ten items and ask "what is the best of these nine items?"[1]
replyI’ve seen "thinking models" go off the rails trying to deduce what to do with ten items and being asked for the best of 9.
[1]: the reality of the situation is subtle internal inconsistencies in the prompt can really confuse it. It is an entertaining bug in AI pipelines, but it can end up costing you a ton of money.
Thank you. This is an excellent argument against using models with hidden COT tokens (claude, gemini, GPT-5). You could end up paying for a huge number of hidden reasoning tokens that aren't useful. And the issue masked by the hidden COT summaries.
replyBut Sydney sounds so fun and free-spirited, like someone I'd want to leave my significant other for and run-away with.
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