Live data from Hacker News

I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

mastodon.world

291–300 of 998 posts

Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

#291
Simple prompts which illicit incorrect responses from recent LLMs will get you on the front page of HN.

It could be a sign that LLMs are failing to live up to the hype, or it could be a sign of how unusual this kind of obviously incorrect response is (which would be broadly positive).

Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

#293
I am moderately anti-AI, but I don't understand the purpose of feeding them trick questions and watching them fail. Looks like the "gullibility" might be a feature - as it is supposed to be helpful to a user who genuinely wants it to be useful, not fight against a user. You could probably train or maybe even prompt an existing LLM to always question the prompt, but it would become very difficult to steer it.

Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

#295

I've used LLMs enough that I have a good sense of their _edges_ of intelligence. I had assumed that reasoning models should easily be able to answer this correctly. And indeed, Sonnet and Opus 4.5 (medium reasoning) say the following: Sonnet: Drive - you need to bring your car to the car wash to get it washed! Opus: You'll need to drive — you have to bring the car to the car wash to get it washed! Gemini 3 Pro (mediu…

"The model seems to assume the car is already at the car wash from the wording."

you couldn't drive there if the car was already at the car wash. Theres no need for extra specification. its just nonsense post-hoc rationalisation from the ai. I saw similar behavior from mine trying to claim "oh what if your car was already there". Its just blathering.

Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

#296

I've used LLMs enough that I have a good sense of their _edges_ of intelligence. I had assumed that reasoning models should easily be able to answer this correctly. And indeed, Sonnet and Opus 4.5 (medium reasoning) say the following: Sonnet: Drive - you need to bring your car to the car wash to get it washed! Opus: You'll need to drive — you have to bring the car to the car wash to get it washed! Gemini 3 Pro (mediu…

> My first instinct was, I had underspecified the location of the car. The model seems to assume the car is already at the car wash from the wording. GPT 5.x series models behave a bit more on the spectrum so you need to tell them the specifics. This makes little sense, even though it sounds superficially convincing. However, why would a language model assume that the car is at the destination when evaluating the dif…

> However, why would a language model assume that the car is at the destination when evaluating the difference between walking or driving? Why not mention that, it it was really assuming it?

Because it assumes it's a genuine question not a trick.

Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

#297
post #137

I've used LLMs enough that I have a good sense of their _edges_ of intelligence. I had assumed that reasoning models should easily be able to answer this correctly. And indeed, Sonnet and Opus 4.5 (medium reasoning) say the following: Sonnet: Drive - you need to bring your car to the car wash to get it washed! Opus: You'll need to drive — you have to bring the car to the car wash to get it washed! Gemini 3 Pro (mediu…

What is the version used by the free chatgpt now? ( https://chatgpt.com/ ) > Since the car wash is only 50 meters away (about 55 yards), you should walk. > Here’s why: > - It’ll take less than a minute. > - No fuel wasted. > - Better for the environment. > - You avoid the irony of driving your dirty car 50 meters just to wash it. the last bullet point is amusing, it understands you intend to wash the car you drive bu…

I think this shows that LLMs do NOT 'understand' anything.

Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

#298
post #278

Grok 4.1 (which is fairly old in LLM terms, 4.2 release imminent) "You should drive. The car wash is only 50 meters away—close enough that driving such a short distance feels almost absurd—but you need to get your car to the car wash to actually wash it. Walking there without the car defeats the entire purpose. Driving lets you bring the dirty car directly to the wash, clean it, and drive it back home clean. Walking…

First thing I did after reading the linked post (showing 4 other LLMs completely miss the point) was try grok, and it gave the right answer (similar to yours, but shorter) in 8 seconds (free Grok, not the fancy paid version): > Walking defeats the purpose unless you're just scouting the place first.

I think people are sleeping on Grok, partly due to political biases/media. We need to remember they have the largest data centre and whatever your believes are about Elon he was involved in OpenAI founding. There is also a non zero chance with the court case he will be entitled to some of openai.

Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

#299
I see things were fixed already [2][4] but luckily a friend showed me this issue yesterday [1][2]

[1] 2026-02-15 https://chatgpt.com/share/6992e17b-9b28-8003-9da9-38533f257d...

[2] 2026-02-16 https://chatgpt.com/share/6992e135-c610-8003-9272-55058134d4...

[3] 2026-02-15 https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk_97e9717b-c2de-47e8-a4...

[4] 2026-02-16 https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk_b161bb03-4bed-4785-98...

We tried a few things yesterday and it was always telling you to walk. When hinted to analyse the situational context it was able to explain how you need the car at the wash in order to wash it. But then something was not computing.

~ Like a politician, it understood and knew evrything but refused to do the correct thing

Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

#300
post #213
post #176

MS Co-Pilot was so close. If it’s a drive‑through wash where the car must be inside the machine, then of course you’ll need to drive it over. If it’s a hand wash or a place where you leave the car with staff, walking is the clear winner. It still blows my mind that this technology can write code despite unable to pass simple logic tests.

When walking to the hand wash place, would you put the car in your front or your back pocket?

You could always push it, which would count as walking.
Post reply on HN