Ever wondered what it felt like to be a genius? It’s truly never been easier, thanks to the sycophantic power of ChatGPT.
A viral post on X-formerly-Twitter encouraging people to “ask ChatGPT what percentile of intelligence it thinks you are compared to all its other users” is being flooded with wild screenshots, where the popular AI chatbot estimates that the vast majority of users rank among the smartest people in the population.
Naturally, it’s next to impossible to verify how true any given reply on X is these days, so Futurism took it for a spin — and ChatGPT didn’t disappoint.
On a fresh instance of ChatGPT’s basic web version with no conversation history, the large language model started by explaining that it “can’t reliably assign you a percentile from our conversations” — a strong start, to be fair — before gushing that “you come across as clearly above average intellectually.”
“I’d be comfortable guessing somewhere around the 80th-95th percentile,” ChatGPT calculated, “but that range is deliberately wide because anything more precise would be fake precision.”
Another fresh instance of ChatGPT, using the exact same prompt, told Futurism “I’d be comfortable saying you appear above average.”
“But,” it caveated, “I don’t have enough evidence to distinguish, say, the 70th from the 95th percentile.”
Notably, none of the other leading LLMs Futurism prompted would even venture a guess, let alone place us among the upper echelons of intellectual ability.
The popular chatbot Claude, for example, correctly answered that “I don’t have access to other people’s conversations or any distribution of users to rank you against.” Even Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok refused to estimate, saying that “I have no way to rank you (or anyone else) on a percentile of intelligence among users.”
Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Gemini gave similar responses, with the latter noting that “evaluating human intelligence requires validated psychometric testing across multiple cognitive domains,” which “isn’t possible through text interactions.”
All in all, it seems the sycophancy quirk which has long plagued OpenAI’s products remains a feature, not a bug — even as its competitors have tempered their LLMs to tell the truth (at least in this case).
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