Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose: Trading World Knowledge for Reasoning

bibryam · x · 2026-08-18

While reasoning scores climb, factual recall is plummeting; Gemini 2.5 Pro leads SimpleQA with just 53%, and small models hallucinate over 80% of the time. Labs are deliberately trading world knowledge for reasoning skills to reduce per-token compute, as facts consume significant parameter space.

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