I know at least one Ph. D. where this could very well be true.
this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2025
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Ha, I know several.
P. S. About to have a PhD myself
Sam Altman wants to raise babies using AI.
Never forget.
Literally the plot of a Neal Stephenson novel.
And the point was you still needed a fucking parent to turn out sane.
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.
Also a PhD is an expert in a hyper specific niche area of their specialty. Would I trust someone who has a PhD in astrophysicist with an expertise on black holes. When it comes to talking about black holes? Yes.
Would I trust that person to give me medical advice? Probably not. Would I trust them to help me show basic car maintenance? Maybe and only because they have experience with car maintenance not because of a PhD.
ceos are so obsessed with this and thinking it can replace doctors in diagnosing people too.
Maybe not replace, but some flavour of AI is already pretty good at analyzing patterns on x-ray images and stuff like that which might be significant help to doctors in the future. Obviously not the glorified autocorrect Altman is running with hype-money, but actually useful neural network things (or whatever they really are, I'm not one building them).
Narrow models trained on a task specific data set tend to be very good at their specialization. So protien folding, or material sciences have benefitted from machine learning, but we shouldn't mistake that for being the same thing as chatGPT.
One of the bigger problems we have with AI at the moment (in my very inexpert opionion) is that they seem to be trying to throw LLMs at every problem and swearing that it'll achieve AGI soon.
Meanwhile Alpha Fold is more closely related to stable diffusion than it is to ChatGPT.
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GPT5 was an effort by OpenAI to reduce costs. It is not smarter than the latest GPT4 models.
Because they are unable to make it smarter
If they could have made it smarter they would have
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.
sometimes they are outdated if they have been doing projects or research for a while too.
It will analyze and parse primary sources with all the discernment of a pure math PhD! Design bridges with all the insight of a literature PhD! Diagnose medical problems with all the experience of a supreme court justice!
Am I supposed to be impressed? I have a PhD level intelligence and I am not exactly impressive.
You missed what they meant. It means gpt5 is really good at one arbitrary and extremely specific topic. Anything else it's comparable with a random person on the street.
Anything else it's comparable with a random person on the street.
I'd say we're actually worse than the average person at everything else. Too much of our brain is allocated to our research.
It does seem like there's an inverse correlation of general intelligence/common sense and specialized study.
Reality is the opposite though. GPT5 is expert in a pretty wide amount of trivia. It’s better than the average uneducated person in every subject, but worse than an expert in every subject.
And the average person has (usually) no idea if what they're being fed is even correct. But as long as it sounds correct to someone who has no idea...
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LMAO right.
This PhD = Genius trope needs to end.
How much of that is the fault of colleges? All that shit about requiring science majors to take liberal arts classes or art majors taking calculus to make them "well rounded." A bachelor's degree is supposed to be a mark that you're just all around better educated than someone with a mere high school diploma, to the point that "It doesn't matter what you major in, just get a degree" is somehow valid advice. But a doctorate is awarded for a significant work of original research; a Ph. D. means you're the world's foremost expert in some tiny corner of a sub-discipline, kind of the opposite of being "well rounded."
But even then, knowledge ≠ intelligence.
And there are plenty of fields that get it completely wrong.
You could argue the majority of economics PhD’s get so stuck into the dominant model they might be less intelligent w.r.t. actual resource distribution than an amateur.
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Most people have PHD intelligence. They just don’t have the motivation, need or care to do all that fucking work to get it.
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)
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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 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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PhDs themselves aren't very smart. They're just sheets of paper. 🤷♂️
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PhD is not even a "level of intelligence".
PhD level of sufficiently regular but transient discipline and hyperfocus.
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The word 'intelligence' doing a lot of heavy lifting in that headline.
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“Intelligence” is such a dumb word.
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.
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does that mean it's also going to have PhD-level depression?
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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