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.
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).
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.
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.
Is it time to update the laws? [1]
The problem is more that instead of reasoning and realizing it didn’t actually know about the book, it just looked up a description of the author and then invented what this book was supposedly about based on the title.
A more intelligent reply would have been something like, “the author appears to be an academic in international relations, but I cannot find this exact book title.” Instead it just repeatedly gave me fake answers.
I presume it can't be with mere prompting, otherwise every single model would already include "Don't lie and don't make things up. If you don't know an answer, just say so."
It seems to me that the underlying algorithms would be inclined to confabulate simply because that's what LLMs do. But that's a bit beyond my math and programming understanding to say for certain.
That's the typical logic flow, innit?