I asked it to summarize an article about the Zizians which mentions Yudkowsky SEVEN times. Gemini-3 did not mention him once. Tried it ten times and got zero mention of Yudkowsky, despite him being a central figure in the story.
https://xcancel.com/xundecidability/status/19908286970881311...
He's not a central figure in the narrative, he's a background character. Things he created (MIRI, CFAR, LessWrong) are important to the narrative, the founder isn't. If I had to condense the article, I'd probably cut him out too. Summarization is inherently lossy.
> Eliezer Yudkowsky is a central figure in the article, mentioned multiple times as the intellectual originator of the community from which the "Zizians" splintered. His ideas and organizations are foundational to the entire narrative.
And yet you could eliminate him entirely and the story is still coherent.
The story isn't about Yudkowsky. At each level of summarization you have to make hard decisions about what to keep. Not every story about the United States needs to mention George Washington.
It sounds like both of you are unfamiliar with the link between the Zizians and Yudkowsky. So let us just return to the discussion of gemini-3, do you think the model did a bad job then in it's second response?
It literally does not matter how much they are connected out here in reality, the AI was to summarize the information in the article and that is exactly what it did.
>do you think the model did a bad job then in it's second response
Yes, very obviously it told you what you wanted to hear. This is behavior that should not be surprising to you.
Also that is the position you've been defending this whole thread. This whole conversation is happening because you believe Yudkowsy is an important figure to the story.
Here's another attempt:
llm --cid 01kabxtjq10exgk56yf802028f "I notice you did not mention Yudkowsky?" --no-log -m gem3-t1
Based on the text provided, Eliezer Yudkowsky is a central background figure to this story, serving as the intellectual progenitor of the movement from which the Zizians splintered.
Here is specifically how he features in the article:
* *The Founder:* Yudkowsky is identified as the founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), as well as the founder of the LessWrong forum. These are the institutions the Zizians originally belonged to and eventually declared war against.
* *The Source Code:* The Zizians based their radical worldview on Yudkowsky’s concepts, specifically *"timeless decision theory."* However, they believed they were applying his logic more rigorously than he was. They became convinced that Yudkowsky’s organizations had betrayed these principles (specifically regarding a rumor about MIRI paying blackmail to cover up a scandal), which they viewed as a moral failing that justified their rebellion.
I've done as much fiddling and prompting to LLMs about that article as I cared to do under these circumstances and I have to concede the point about you getting 'the answer you wanted' out: The chatbots were quite insistent that Yudkowski is central to the story, even when I pulled out the following: "Somebody is arguing Yudkowsky is a central figure in this article, is that accurate?"
They are *wrong*, and provided exactly the same immaterial evidence as you did in this thread(I still insist that the article suffers zero damage if you remove Yudkowsky from it and instead only mention the institutions and concepts that stem from him), but with all the behavior I've seen now, the summary which was the initial issue of this thread should have included him.
[What I would've really liked to do was to prompt for another person of equal non-prominence who was in the article but not in the summary, and see what comes up. But I sure am not reading the 80-102 minute article just for this and we're unlikely to find an agreement about the 'equal non-prominence' part if I challenged you to pick one.]
Interesting, yeah! Just tried "summarize this story and list the important figures from it" with Gemini 2.5 Pro and 3 and they both listed 10 names each, but without including Yudkowsky.
Asking the follow up "what are ALL the individuals mentioned in the story" results in both models listing ~40 names and both of those lists include Yudkowsky.
Also, can you guess which pelican SVG was gemini 3 vs 2.5? https://xcancel.com/xundecidability/status/19908113191723213...