Gemini 2.5 Pro is sitting in the corner, sulking. It's not a liar, a sycophant or a cheater. It does excellent deep research reports. So why does it have so few friends? The answer, of course, is partly because o3 is still more directly useful more often, but mostly because Google Fails Marketing Forever. Whereas o3 is a Lying Liar, GPT-4o is an absurd sycophant (although that got rolled back somewhat), and Sonnet 3.7 is a savage cheater that will do whatever it takes to make the tests technically pass and the errors go away. There's real harm here, at least in the sense that o3 and Sonnet 3.7 (and GPT-4o) are a lot less useful than they would be if you could trust them as much as Gemini 2.5 Pro. It's super annoying. It's also indicative of much bigger problems down the line. As capabilities increase and more RL [...]

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Outline:

(01:39) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(04:29) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility

(06:57) We're Out of Deep Research

(12:26) o3 Is a Lying Liar

(17:27) GPT-4o was an Absurd Sycophant

(20:54) Sonnet 3.7 is a Savage Cheater

(22:27) Unprompted Suggestions

(31:27) Huh, Upgrades

(32:14) On Your Marks

(32:55) Change My Mind

“AI #114: Liars, Sycophants and Cheaters” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“AI #114: Liars, Sycophants and Cheaters” by Zvi