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unstatusthequo • last Sunday at 4:57 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

Yes. I tried to ask oss-gpt to ask me a riddle. The response was absurd. Came up with a nonsensical question, then told me the answer. The answer was a four letter “word” that wasn’t actually a real word.

“What is the word that starts with S, ends with E, and contains A? → SAEA”

Then when I said that’s not a word and you gave me the answer already, no fun, it said

“I do not have access to confirm that word.”

Replies

verisimi • last Sunday at 5:14 PM

lol. The answer it gave doesn't even end in an 'E'.

threeducks • last Sunday at 7:02 PM

FWIW, I asked gpt-oss-120b this question 10 times and the answer was always "sauce", "sane" or "sale". I also tried different temperatures (from 0 to 1), which did not seem to have an effect on the correctness of the answer.

EDIT: I now have also questioned the smaller gpt-oss-20b (free) 10 times via OpenRouter (default settings, provider was AtlasCloud) and the answers were: sage, sane, sane, space, sane, sane, sane, sane, space, sane.

You are either very unlucky, your configuration is suboptimal (weird system prompt perhaps?) or there is some bug in whichever system you are using for inference.

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roscas • last Sunday at 5:22 PM

"The word is SAME." for qwen3-coder and it took like 10 seconds to write all the thinking because it writes it down, but processing was 0 seconds.

"I need to find a word that starts with S, ends with E, and contains A.

Let me think through this step by step:

    Starts with S
    Ends with E
    Contains A somewhere in the middle
One word that fits this pattern is "SAGE" - but that only has 4 letters and would be S-A-G-E, which doesn't work because it doesn't contain A in the middle.

Wait, let me reconsider. The word "SAGE" actually works if I read it correctly:

    Starts with S
    Ends with E  
    Contains A
Actually, "SAGE" is S-A-G-E, so it starts with S and ends with E, but it contains A in the second position.

Let me think of other possibilities:

    "SQUARE" - starts with S, ends with E, contains A (in the middle)
    "SALE" - starts with S, ends with E, contains A
    "SAME" - starts with S, ends with E, contains A
Wait, "SAME" is S-A-M-E - that works! It starts with S, ends with E, and contains A.

The word is SAME. "

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