Talks to Watch

Why ChatGPT Can't Draw a Full Glass of Wine

6.3M views · Feb 22, 2025 · 20:55 · 2 HN recommenders · 5 mentions · discussed 2025

Alex O'Connor shows that ChatGPT cannot draw a wine glass filled to the brim, and ties the failure to David Hume's missing shade of blue. It asks what the failure says about how image models learn.

Why Hacker News points people here: HN treats it as the origin of the full-wine-glass meme and an illustration of how models lack concepts missing from their training data.

“this video is where the "AI can't draw a full glass of wine" meme got traction”HN comment, 2025

What Hacker News said 5

Recommendsproc0Feb 2025

“There is also a great video by Alex O'Connor on a simple prompt to generate a full glass of wine, which illustrates this really well”

Shows ChatGPT failing to draw a full wine glass, illustrating AI limits.

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I completely agree. You can see this limitation if you try to create anything complex with the current state of the art. There is also a great video by Alex O'Connor on a simple prompt to generate a full glass of wine, which illustrates this really well - this video This wave of AI is amazing. It's a great tool for many applications, and it will even revolutionize many of them, but it is still far from AGI, a term that has been hijacked by the tech industry to hype up their products. In some ways AI has advanced a lot, but in other ways it has been set back by the hype and muddying of the terms.

in “AI Is Already Obsolete – The Open Challenge No One Will Answer” · view on HN
Recommendsjimbo808Sep 2025

“illustrates it pretty well”

Illustrates that models lack world models for concepts missing from training data.

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I think you're looking at it too abstractly. An LLM isn't representing anything, it has a bag of numbers that some other algorithm produced for it. When you give it some numbers, it takes them and does matrix operations with them in order to randomly select a token from a softmax distribution, one at a time, until the EOS token is generated. If they don't have any training data that covers a particular concept, they can't map it onto a world model and make predictions about that concept based on an understanding of the world and how it works. [This video]( this video ) illustrates it pretty well. These things may or may not end up being fixed in the models, but that's only because they've been further trained with the specific examples. Brains have world models. Cats see a cup of water, and they know exactly what will happen when you tip it over (and you can bet they're gonna do it).

in “Getting AI to work in complex codebases” · view on HN
Cites itwavemodeMar 2025

Example of diffusion models failing to generalize to a full wine glass.

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Well, maybe. Maybe not. See "Why can't ChatGPT draw a full glass of wine?" this video Diffusion models do posses some capability to synthesize ideas, but that capability does not necessarily generalize to every possible use case. So it's impossible to say for certain that that is what is happening.

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Cites itkallebooMar 2025

“this video is where the "AI can't draw a full glass of wine" meme got traction”

Origin of the full wine glass AI meme, with explicit prompts failing.

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I think you're missing the context everyone else has - this video is where the "AI can't draw a full glass of wine" meme got traction this video The prompts (some generated by ChatGPT itself, since it's instructing DALL-E behind the scenes) include phrases like "full to the brim" and "almost spilling over" that are not up to interpretation at all.

Cites itEGregApr 2025

Cited as the example of a prompt that stumps image models.

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Draw a clock that shows [time other than 10:10] Draw a wine glass that's totally full to the brim etc. this video link

in “Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model” · view on HN