LLM failures go viral because they trigger a "Schadenfreude" response to automation anxiety. If the oracle can't do basic logic, our jobs feel safe for another quarter. Wrong.
[dead]
I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
341–350 of 998 posts
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#342Mistral's Le Chat also fails spectacularly. Although interestingly it assumes that the "walk" option means you are carrying washing supplies back and forth in order to wash the car while it's parked at home. I wonder if the other models assume this is what you mean, IOW they may not know how a "car wash" normally operates.
"""
Great question! Here are a few things to consider:
If you walk: It’s only 50 meters, so it’s a very short distance—less than a minute on foot. You’ll avoid getting your car dirty again on the way to the car wash. It’s a quick way to stretch your legs and save a tiny bit of fuel.
If you drive: It’s so close that driving might feel unnecessary, but it could save you from carrying any supplies (like vacuum cleaners or cleaning products) back and forth. If the weather is bad (rain, extreme heat, etc.), driving might be more comfortable.
Verdict: Walking is probably the easiest and most practical choice for such a short distance, unless you have a specific reason to drive. What’s the weather like where you are? That might help decide!
"""
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#343I'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…
I just tried claude, only Opus gave the correct answer. Haiku & Sonnet both told me to walk.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
No, your opinion is wrong because the reason some models don't seem to have some "strong opinion" on anything is not related to predicting words based on how similar they are to other sentences in the training data. It's most likely related to how the model was trained with reinforcement learning, and most specifically, to recent efforts by OpenAI to reduce hallucination rates by penalizing guessing under uncertainty[1].
[1] https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/d04913be-3f6f-4d2b-b283-ff432ef4a...
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#345I 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 politi…
Yes Grok gets it right even when told to not use web search. But the answer I got from the fast model is nonsensical. It recommends to drive because you'd not save any time walking and because "you'd have to walk back wet". The thinking-fast model gets it correct for the right reasons every time. Chain of thought really helps in this case.
Interestingly, Gemini also gets it right. It seems to be better able to pick up on the fact it's a trick question.
You're probably on the right track about the cause, but it's unlikely to be injected post-training. I'd expect post-training to help improve the situation. The problem starts with the training set. If you just train an LLM on the internet you get extreme far left models. This problem has been talked about by all the major labs. Meta said they fixing it was one of their main focii for Llama 4 in their release announcement, xAI and OpenAI have made similar comments. Probably xAI team have just done a lot more to clean the data set.
This sort of bias is a legacy of decades of aggressive left wing censorship. Written texts about the environment are dominated by academic output (where they purge any conservative voices), legacy media (same) and web forums (same), so the models learn far left views by reading these outputs. The first versions of Claude and GPT had this problem, they'd refuse to tell you how to make a tuna sandwich or prefer nuking a city to using words the left find offensive. Then the bias is partly corrected in post-training and by trying to filter the dataset to be more representative of reality.
Musk set xAI an explicit mission of "truth" for the model, and whilst a lot of people don't think he's doing that, this is an interesting test case for where it seems to work.
Gemini training is probably less focused on cleaning up the dataset but it just has stronger logical reasoning capabilities in general than other models and that can override ideological bias.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#346From the images in the link, Deepseek apparently "figured it out" by assuming the car to be washed was the car with you. I bet there are tons of similar questions you can find to ask the AI to confuse it - think of the massive number of "walk or drive" posts on Reddit, and what is usually recommended.
https://chat.deepseek.com/share/ewfxrfhb7obmide29x it understands it perfectly if you don't disable reasoning.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#347I'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…
I was surprised at your result for ChatGPT 5.2, so I ran it myself (through the chat interface). On extended thinking, it got it right. On standard thinking, it got it wrong.
I'm not sure what you mean by "high"- are you running it through cursor, codex or directly through API or something? Those are not ideal interfaces through which to ask a question like this.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#348?
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#349> Can you rethink - this is a logic puzzle and you missed some crucial detail in the question.
>> Ah, you're right! Let me reconsider... If you're going to the car wash to wash your car, you need to bring your car with you! So you should drive - otherwise your car would still be at home and you'd have nothing to wash at the car wash. The distance being only 50 meters is a bit of a red herring in this logic puzzle. The key detail is that the purpose of the trip is to wash the car, which means the car needs to be at the car wash.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#350Yesterday I gave ChatGPT in an anonymous browser window (not logged in) two columns of TAB separated numbers, about 40 rows. I asked it to give me the weighted average of the numbers in the second column, using the first one (which were integer, "quantity", numbers) as the weight. It retuned formulas and executed them and presented a final result. It looked good. Too bad Excel and then Claude, that I decided to ask t…
Yeah, but now you know if you need to do math, you ask the AI for a python script to do the math correctly.
It's just a tool that you get better at using over time; a hammer wouldn't complain if you tried using it as a screwdriver..