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Comment by hx2a | Hacker News Reader

And yet, generative AI also seems to be poor at randomness. When I ask Google Gemini for a list of 50 random words, it gave me a list of 18 unique words, with 16 of them repeated exactly 3 times.

Abyss: 1 Ambiguous: 3 Cacophony: 3 Crescendo: 3 Ephemeral: 3 Ethereal: 3 Euphoria: 3 Labyrinth: 3 Maverick: 3 Melancholy: 3 Mellifluous: 3 Nostalgia: 3 Oblivion: 3 Paradox: 3 Quixotic: 1 Serendipity: 3 Sublime: 3 Zenith: 3

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Randomness is difficult. I wouldn't expect any LLM to be able to reliably produce random anything, except in the cases where they have access to tools (ChatGPT Code Interpreter could use Python's random.random() for example).

Okay, but repeating words?

Makes sense to me: It's not understanding and complying with your request, it's doing statistics to guess what kind of follow-up would be most common.

Are you using regular or pro? As pro has no issues with this task.

Regular user. For useful tasks, how much of a difference does the Pro plan make?

Nowhere near as good as ChatGPT 4o or Claude (in not one case have I had it outperform those other two), but at least it can do math and data science correctly most of the time compared to the regular model.

I use it as a secondary when the other two are chewing on other tasks already.

I only own it as I am an outrageously heavy consumer of LLMs for all sorts of little projects at once and they all seem to pause one window if you use another.

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