Most people have PHD intelligence. They just don’t have the motivation, need or care to do all that fucking work to get it.
this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2025
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To be honest, as I chat with more and more random strangers these days it does begin to dawn on me that we all do roughly spend ~70 years on this planet devoting our attention to one thing or another, and that though people might not have what is seen as "classical intelligence" (i.e. high IQ's, political savvy, high empathy / sociopathy, etc.), we are genuinely absolute genius's in one particular field or another.
For example, I had an old roommate whose politics would make me drink and stare at the horizon whilst he consistently acted against his own self interests to punish people he was told are responsibly for his financial lot in life. But, he was an absolute wizard when it came to predicting the outcome of a sports game. It could be anything - football, hockey, tennis, whatever - he immediately ran their stats straight off the top off his head, summarized their strengths and weaknesses and came out with an outcome that was on the whole close to the truth.
Another example, my ex. We never really had deep philosophical discussions about the state of the world, and her consumerist lifestyle was one I tried to actively ignore. But, she was incredible at turning a house into a home -- her interior design skills would genuinely surprise me at how well-thought out and in-depth they were, not only in terms of style and decor, but also in the way that she would execute and coordinate the tasks with me to beautify our home.
TL;DR -- I do really think most people have high intelligence in one specific field or another, we just value people unequally using classical measures of success (wealth, education)
If your roommate was so good at predicting the outcome of sporting events, couldn’t he have used that skill to fix his financial situation, rather than blame others?
Tbh, transforming your talents into money is also a skill that some people have in spades and some people lack entirely. I've actually always bristled about that skill specifically, because I think Kim kardashian is an absolute phenom in that area and it always rankles when people say she’s stupid. She turned: a moderately famous but deceased and no longer relevant dad; relatively very high wealth (but not comparable to her current estate); an assistanceship to Paris Hilton; and a sex tape into an absolute empire. That’s a lot of points in her favor, but she makes the best possible decisions so consistently, she’s got to be one of the marketing greats.
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To obtain a PhD, you need to contribute something original to your field of study, not just regurgitate what you've scraped from other studies.
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The word 'intelligence' doing a lot of heavy lifting in that headline.
I hate the way the media makes this problem so much worse by incorrectly describing LLMs. They can't "have intelligence". They are incapable of any kind of thought. The "intelligence" of GPT1 and GPT5 are the same, in that neither have any. They are complex computational algorithms designed to generate text from prompts. That is absolutely not the same thing as thinking or knowing things.
There are entire cults springing out of the ground believing LLMs to literally be thinking feeling beings 💀 we are so beyond fucked.
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Just a few... more... trillion dollars! And all your drinking water.
And slave labor, not only to build the hardware, but to view the mountains of CSAM and other heinous material to build the "guardrails"
PhDs themselves aren't very smart. They're just sheets of paper. 🤷♂️
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They’re also talking about data centers in space, yet are too cheap to use anything but evaporative cooling + supplemental gas generators on Earth.
I did some math on, amongst other things, launch costs for an Earth-data center sized installation, or the area needed to radiatively cool it, and it is fun:
https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/heatrad.php
See that power of four? Areas get very large, like kilometers wide, if you want your coolant below a typical 300K (~30C), and apparently no one told Bezos that little detail.
Those space construction startups know what they’re doing. They’re selling billionaires a bridge to nowhere; and it’s working.
Capitalism has a whole lot of cult-like qualities. The space stuff just shows we are end game.
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PhD is not even a "level of intelligence".
Well it's a phrase for those of "not-PhD" level.
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so it still won't know how to make me a sandwitch?
I just want it to cook for me and clean my goddamn house.
I'd settle for laundry and dishes
Best I can do is a creepy-ass remote operated robot that’s supposed to do your chores.
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And the grocery shopping.
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Me: “Hey GPT-5 Ive been diagnosed cancer.” GPT-5: “Have you thought about using cocaine and essential oils!”
Yes! But I still have cancer
Someone with a PHD isn't inherently more intelligent than other humans. They are able to put in the time and effort to become a subject matter expert in a field.
I get that it's all buzz, but they simply don't understand human intelligence, how can they even dream to replicate it. AGI is a myth.
My wife is currently writing her dissertation. So no shade to PHDs.
AGI isn't a myth, it's just never going to happen with an LLM as its core.
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Based on the fact that they'd give someone like me a PhD, this comes as no surprise. But it's not saying as much about GPT-5 as a lot of people might think.
I feel like I've been hearing this stupid "PhD level intelligence" claim about every LLM that's come out since ChatGPT was first released, including GPT-3.0 which it launched with. It kind of amazes me that people keep falling for it and not questioning how the new model having "PhD level intelligence" is both a true claim and also noteworthy when the claim is made about every new model.
Iv met enough phd holders to know that they can and frequently are still unabashedly wrong on the vast majority of everything they talk about that isn't hyper specific to a narrow and niche topic.
So phd level intelligence to me just means it's more prone to the being confidently wrong and judgemental.
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They said that for v3.5 lol
As someone who has a PhD and self identifies as a dumbass I can confidently say, it is not a high bar
Maybe she meant PDF level intelligence
Work in Academia … I’m not sure this is a high bar.
If you take me as the reference PhD, then it'd be stupid as fuck.
I still really doubt the ability for LLMs to develop new knowledge and experiment to prove its accuracy. They do a below average job at spitting out existing knowledge but creating new information that isn’t already on Wikipedia or elsewhere on the internet is something else beyond their scope.
There are certain types of problems they are better at solving. Basically if we already have all of the needed information, but you need to synthesize a huge amount of it into the final answer, they'll be excellent at that kind of issue.
True, they can be a useful tool. One of the big things that really annoy me is how they are being pushed as a solve everything miracle rather than just a tool that is useful in certain cases.
I guess that isn’t as profitable and they have to push it on everyone for things it does poorly just in the name of forcing widespread adoption.
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Yes. "PhD" level intelligence. Not PhD level intelligence. The quotes are part of the word. They are not optional.
No no. "Ph.D." stands for "Phillip Dick", an old drinking pal of Sam Altman. According to some interviews, you can ask him pretty much anything and get a response.
I know a dude with a PhD in Computer Science who's far-right and his sister is a psychiatrist who thinks conversion therapy works lol lmao
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“Intelligence” is such a dumb word.
I know at least one Ph. D. where this could very well be true.
it'll know all about cellular biology and not be able to operate a cash register.
PhD level intelligence
Which PhD's, exactly?
Yes, that matters quite a lot, actually.
So it's gonna be burnt out and addicted to coffee?
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