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Comment by jordanb | Hacker News Reader

AI's main use case continues to be a replacement for management consulting.

Ask any SOTA AI this question: "Two fathers and two sons sum to how many people?" and then tell me if you still think they can replace anything at all.

GPT-5 mini:

Three people — a grandfather, his son, and his grandson. The grandfather and the son are the two fathers; the son and the grandson are the two sons.

Is the grandfather nobody's son?

I just did. It gave me two correct answers. (And it's a bad riddle anyway.)

Oh you forgot to say "it's not a riddle" and then get the right answer lol

This is undefined. Without more information you don’t know the exact number of people.

Riddle me this, why didn’t you do a better riddle?

No, but you can establish limits, like the total set of possible solutions.

Person 1: "I need chairs for two fathers and two sons to sit"

Person 2: 'Okay, I have no idea how many chairs to grab, not enough information' - nobody ever

(Person 2 has no ability to contribute to anything of economic value.)

Anyone who talks like person 1 contributes negative economic value.

No sounds like a normal person lol. Just ask an LLM why I'm right and you're wrong. You're welcome.

I put it into AI and TIL about "gotcha arguments" and eristics and went down a rabbit hole. Thanks for this!

"SOTA AI, to cross this bridge you must answer my questions three."

What answer do you expect here? There's four people referenced in the sentence. There's more implied because of Mothers, but if you're including transient dependencies, where do we stop?

It can also be 3 people, as one person can be a father and a son at the same time. If you allow non-mentioned people to be included in the attribute (i.e. the sons of the fathers are not part of the 2) it could also be 2 people, as long as they are fathers.

Just follow up with "it's not a riddle" and the LLM will answer your question.

Any number between 2 and 4 is valid, so it's a really poor test, the machine cna never be wrong. Heck, maybe even 1 if we're talking someone schizophrenic. I got to wonder which answer YOU wanted to hear. Are you Jekyl or Hide?

Lol that's powerful cope. Just follow up with "it's not a riddle" and you'll get the right answer.

If you force it to use chain-of-thought: "Two fathers and two sons sum to how many people? Enumerate all the sets of solutions"

"Assuming the group consists only of “the two fathers and the two sons” (i.e., every person in the group is counted as a father and/or a son), the total number of distinct people can only be 3 or 4.

Reason: you are taking the union of a set of 2 fathers and a set of 2 sons. The union size is 2+2−overlap, so it is 4 if there’s no overlap and 3 if exactly one person is both a father and a son. (It cannot be 2 in any ordinary family tree.)"

Here it clearly states its assumption (finite set of people that excludes non-mentioned people, etc.)

https://chatgpt.com/share/698b39c9-2ad0-8003-8023-4fd6b00966...

Every father is a son to somebody...

Then you'll ask it to evaluate the possible solutions and it will forget the original problem entirely by the time it's done enumerating solutions.

Great job, AI labs! It's almost TOO useful

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