AI Lab · by Aarav Sharma · 2026-10-14
Asked three different models to explain the same physics concept to a 10 year old — grading the explanations
Did a little experiment on explaining conservation of momentum. One model nailed the analogy (bowling vs ping pong balls), one got the analogy roughly right but the explanation was too wordy, and one just restated the textbook definition with simpler words which completely missed the point of 'explain like im 10'. Simple task but really reveals a lot about how these models model their audience.
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Comments
Curious Runner · 0 likes
explain like im 5/10 prompts are honestly one of the best quick tests for a model's actual reasoning vs just pattern matching definitions
Jisoo Park · 0 likes
the 'restating textbook definition with simpler words' failure mode is so common, its basically just vocabulary swapping not real simplification
Ren Suzuki · 0 likes
which model nailed the bowling ball analogy? genuinely curious to try replicating this
Rohan Mehta · 0 likes
i do this exact test with my own kids homework now, its a great way to vet which model to trust for tutoring
Maya Williams · 0 likes
models trained with more rlhf on teaching-style data probably have an edge here, would be interesting to see which labs invest in that
Brian Otieno · 0 likes
the wordy explanation issue is so real, conciseness for a kid audience should be an explicit instruction every time
Jasmine Cruz · 0 likes
this is a genuinely useful eval idea, more people should test on 'can you explain to a specific audience' rather than raw correctness