Umm...
Saturday August 1, 2026
“Grok 4 is better than PhD level in every subject. No exceptions” - Elon Musk
“The magic of deep learning is it just works”
- Leopold Aschenbrenner
On July 26, senior US State Department official displayed a map of Africa as part of the presentation “Transforming health assistance: Implementing U.S. government MOUs for sustainable HIV programs.” Given during a pre-conference session at AIDS: 2026 in Brazil.
The State Department requires a comprehension exam to be passed before an applicant is consider for employment called the Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT) which explicitly features questions on world geography. The FSOT is one of, if not the, hardest of such tests.
If you followed the news this week or if you are just perceptive you know where this is going. Not one of the countries in the presentation was correct. In fact not all of the countries identified are even actually countries. From the BBC article:
“Four of the six African countries highlighted - Nigeria, Mozambique, Ivory Coast and Malawi - are all incorrectly positioned. Uganda is roughly in the right place but is misshapen and Cameroon is mentioned in the key but the name is not linked to a country on the map.”
In the US, 4th graders (average age 9) are given map pages and crayons and are asked to color in countries. Being able to read and color in a map is literally an elementary school skill. So how can an LLM (and I don’t know which LLM created that map) be at a PhD level and fail a 4th grade task?
—AJ