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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15232 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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they literally flew a cargo plane loaded with billions of dollars in cold hard cash to Tehran to pay the Mullahgeld.

Mr. Chatgpt and Mr. Gemini both agree that it's physically impossible for that plane to transport remotely close to the claimed amount. Maybe there was a bribe in that plane but the overall claim is not credible.

How are LLM's reliable here? They are word predictors not engineers. They have no way of calculating what is and isn't feasible.

LLMs are perfectly capable of looking up simple values such as the cargo capacity of an airplane, and the weight of money, and doing the simple arithmetic based on this.

If you disagree you are more than capable of performing the back of the envelope calculation by hand.

The onus is on you to verify what the LLM outputs, not for us to do it. Anyone can query an LLM, the only thing that makes such output valuable is when a human fact checks it.

I'm the most rabid anti AI luddide on this forum and I can tell you that LLMs can do perfect basic arithmetic.

I'm ready to wager $50 right now that you can't demonstrate a single example of gpt 5.x, gemini pro 3.x, claude opus 4.x making an error of more than 10% of basic arithmetic (plus minus multiply divide) for any 2 numbers up to 10^10. Just share the chat link and I will PP you the money.

Justification for 10% margin: since we are talking back of the envelope calculation, a trivial error does not change the answer

Not that I am not asking for the latest models, but I am ruling out cost optimized models (gpt mini, gemini flash) as they are intentionally compromising capability heavily to lower cost.

If you can avoid the tool calls, you can still get multiplication-of-decimal errors, but it is increasingly rare. That said, I'd be more concerned about the problem being under-specified; the same question asked a different way gets a different answer.

EDIT: I make no claims about the politics, here, which I'd expect to have larger impact.

Hmm I assumed it would be usd because that's what the reuters mentioned. (That's a problem with my human meat not the robot though)

Maybe it was flying in rare Beanie Babies.

Would be almost as hysterical if they flew a plane out there transporting a piece of paper with the number of a checking account on it though.

More realistically it would be to sign papers over the deal and shake hands

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