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This analogy may be too close to the real thing to work, but it reminds me of a Chinese room type situation where its entire understanding of the world is through messages of text.

You say that’s an error a human couldn’t do, but imagine if the human has never seen or touched the kind of item you were making and relied entirely on text descriptions to build its ontology. Off by 90 seems like such a believable mistake.

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Also, not to sound like a naive hypemonger, but: in a decade I'd bet a ton of money the best AI systems will make strange mistakes of this nature at a far, far lower rate than they do today. They will gain a more holistic and more human-like perspective about each task.

(even if it's through some silly means like explicitly talking to themselves like "if I were a human doing this, what [... 5 million tokens in 2 seconds ...]" but also of course if they crack ASI and get something more efficient and intelligent than a human brain by then)

I think of it kind of like how Chess AI make "mistakes" which are unrecognizable to humans but a stronger AI would be able to pick them apart. That's kind of scary...

There's a famous early world map created by Ptolemy from compiling reports of sailors which is amazingly accurate for its time but had the country of Scotland off by 90 degrees.

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