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

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

#321

Post by nicbou »

jstummbillig wrote: post #147
prasoonds wrote: post #46

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…

> so you need to tell them the specifics That is the entire point, right? Us having to specify things that we would never specify when talking to a human. You would not start with "The car is functional. The tank is filled with gas. I have my keys." As soon as we are required to do that for the model to any extend that is a problem and not a detail (regardless that those of us, who are familiar with the matter, do bu…

I get that issue constantly. I somehow can't get any LLM to ask me clarifying questions before spitting out a wall of text with incorrect assumptions. I find it particularly frustrating.

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

#322

Post by [deleted] »

cobolexpert wrote: post #281
jen729w wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opus 4.6 with thinking. Result was near-instant: “Drive. You need the car at the car wash.”

Changed 50 meters to 43 meters with Opus 4.6: “Walk. 43 meters is basically crossing a parking lot. ”

[deleted]

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

#323

Post by pfalke »

vlovich123 wrote: post #120

Gemini fast > That is a classic "efficiency vs. logic" dilemma. Honestly, unless you’ve invented a way to teleport or you're planning on washing the car with a very long garden hose from your driveway, you’re going to have to drive. > While 50 meters is a great distance for a morning stroll, it’s a bit difficult to get the car through the automated brushes (or under the pressure washer) if you aren't behind the wheel…

Gemini fast: „Walking: It will take you about 45 seconds. You will arrive refreshed and full of steps, but you will be standing next to a high-pressure hose with no car to spray.“

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

#325

Post by andy12_ »

csomar wrote: post #189
lkeskull wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this example worked in 2021, it's 2026. wake up. these models are not just "finding the most likely next word based on what they've seen on the internet".

Unless LLMs architecture have changed, that is exactly what they are doing. You might need to learn more how LLMs work.

Unless the LLM is a base model or just a finetuned base model, it definitely doesn't predict words just based on how likely they are in similar sentences it was trained on. Reinforcement learning is a thing and all models nowadays are extensively trained with it.

If anything, they predict words based on a heuristic ensemble of what word is most likely to come next in similar sentences and what word is most likely to give a final higher reward.

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

#326

Post by deliciousturkey »

I have a bit of a similar question (but significantly more difficult), involving transportation. To me it really seems that a lot of the models are trained to have a anti-car and anti-driving bias, to the point that it hinders the models ability to reason correctly or make correct answers.

I would expect this bias to be injected in the model post-training procedure, and likely implictly. Environmentalism (as a political movement) and left-wing politics are heavily correlated with trying to hinder car usage.

Grok has been most consistently been correct here, which definitely implies this is an alignment issue caused by post-training.

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

#327

Post by spuz »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #296
tsimionescu wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There's some evidence for that if you try these two different prompts with Gpt 5.2 thinking:

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

Answer: walk

Try this brainteaser: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50m away. Should I walk or drive to the car wash?

Answer: drive

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

#328

Post by hansmayer »

nearbuy wrote: post #235
jaccola wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person above was being a bit pedantic, and zealous in their anti-anthropomorphism. But they are literally predicting the next token. They do nothing else. Also if you think they were just predicting the next token in 2021, there has been no fundamental architecture change since then. All gains have been via scale and efficiency optimisations (not to discount that, an awful lot of complexity in both of these)

That's not what they said. They said: > It's evaluation function simply returned the word "Most" as being the most likely first word in similar sentences it was trained on. Which is false under any reasonable interpretation. They do not just return the word most similar to what they would find in their training data. They apply reasoning and can choose words that are totally unlike anything in their training data. If…

You are actually proving my point with your example, if you think about it a bit more.

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

#330

Post by hansmayer »

andy12_ wrote: post #325
csomar wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless LLMs architecture have changed, that is exactly what they are doing. You might need to learn more how LLMs work.

Unless the LLM is a base model or just a finetuned base model, it definitely doesn't predict words just based on how likely they are in similar sentences it was trained on. Reinforcement learning is a thing and all models nowadays are extensively trained with it. If anything, they predict words based on a heuristic ensemble of what word is most likely to come next in similar sentences and what word is most likely to…

You know that when A. Karpathy released NanoLLM (or however it was called), he said it was mainly coded by hand as the LLMs were not helpful because "the training dataset was way off". So yeah, your argumentation actually "reinforces" my point.
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