alt Hacker News> they clearly don't have any world model whatsoever
Then how did an LLM get gold on the mathematical Olympiad, where it certainly hadn’t seen the questions before? How on earth is that possible without a decent working model of mathematics? Sure, LLMs might make weird errors sometimes (nobody is denying that), but clearly the story is rather more complicated than you suggest.
> where it certainly hadn’t seen the questions before?
What are you basing this certainty on?
And even if you're right that the specific questions had not come up, it may still be that the questions from the math olympiad were rehashes of similar questions in other texts, or happened to correspond well to a composition of some other problems that were part of the training set, such that the LLM could 'pick up' on the similarity.
It's also possible that the LLM was specifically trained on similar problems, or may even have a dedicated sub-net or tool for it. Still impressive, but possibly not in a way that generalizes even to math like one might think based on the press releases.