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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?

#541

Post by mk89 »

viking123 wrote: post #431
mk89 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I see it is that long game is to have agents in your life that memorize and understand your routine, facts, more and more. Imagine having an agent that knows about cars, and more specifically your car, when the checkups are due, when you washed it last time, etc., another one that knows more about your hobbies, another that knows more about your XYZ etc. The more specific they are, the more accurate they typi…

Do really understand deeply and in great amount I feel we would need models with changing weights and everyone would have their own so they could truly adjust to the user. Now we have have chunk of context that it may or may not use properly if it gets too long. But then again, how do we prevent it learning the wrong things if the weights are adjusting.

In principle you're right but these things can get probably 60-70% of the job done. The rest is up to "you". Never rely on it blindly as we're being told kind of... :)

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

#542

Post by losvedir »

pu_pe wrote: post #523
losvedir wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're the one anthropomorphizing here. What's shocking isn't that it "knows" something or not, but that it gets the answer wrong often. There are plenty of questions it will get right nearly every time.

In which way am I anthropomorphizing?

I guess I mean that you're projecting anthropomorphization. When I see people sharing examples that the model answered wrong, I'm not interpreting that they think it "didn't know" the answer. Rather, they're reproducing the error. Most simple questions the models will get right nearly every time, so showing a failure is useful data.

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

#543

Post by steveBK123 »

Gabrys1 wrote: post #524
KronisLV wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Us having to specify things that we would never specify when talking to a human. The first time I read that question I got confused: what kind of question is that? Why is it being asked? It should be obvious that you need your car to wash it. The fact that it is being asked in my mind implies that there is an additional factor/complication to make asking it worthwhile, but I have no idea what. Is the car already at…

I would say, the proper response to this question is not "walk, blablablah" but rather "What do you mean? You need to drive your car to have it washed. Did I miss anything?"

Yes, this is what irks me about all the chatbots, and the chat interface as a whole. It is a chat-like UX without a chat-like experience. Like you are talking to a loquacious autist about their favorite topic every time.

Just ask me a clarifying question before going into your huge pitch. Chats are a back & forth. You don’t need to give me a response 10x longer than my initial question. Etc

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

#544

Post by dist-epoch »

ninjagoo wrote: post #533
dist-epoch wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a senior scientist at a national lab thinking ai isn't really useful because the free reasoning version couldn't generate working code I would question if such a scientist should be doing science, it seems they have serious cognitive biases

My bad; I should have been more precise: "ai" in this case is "LLMs for coding". If all one uses is the free thinking model their conclusion about its capability is perfectly valid because nowhere is it clearly specified that the 'free, thinking' model is not as capable as the 'paid, thinking ' model, Even the model numbers are the same. And given that the highest capability LLMs are closed source and locked behind p…

> nowhere is it clearly specified that the 'free, thinking' model is not as capable as the 'paid, thinking '

nowhere is it clearly specified that the free model IS as capable as the paid one either. so if you have uncertainty if IS/IS-NOT as capable, what sort of scientist assumes the answer IS?

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

#545

Post by p1esk »

benterix wrote: post #493
rahidz wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For GPT at least, a lot of it is because "DO NOT ASK A CLARIFYING QUESTION OR ASK FOR CONFIRMATION" is in the system prompt. Twice. https://github.com/Wyattwalls/system_prompts/blob/main/OpenA...

Out of curiosity: when you add custom instructions client-side, does it change this behavior?

It does. Just put it in the custom instructions section.

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

#546

Post by malfist »

ash_091 wrote: post #443
nicbou wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"If you're unsure, ask. Don't guess." in prompts makes a huge difference, imo.

I have that in my system prompt for chatgpt and it almost never makes a difference. I can count on one hand the number of times its asked in the past year. Unless you count the engagement hacking questions at the end of a response

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

#547

Post by wongarsu »

jnovek wrote: post #422
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…

You may be anthropomorphizing the model, here. Models don’t have “assumptions”; the problem is contrived and most likely there haven’t been many conversations on the internet about what to do when the car wash is really close to you (because it’s obvious to us). The training data for this problem is sparse.

Reasoning automata can make assumptions. Lots of algorithms make "assumptions", often with backtracking if they don't work out. There is nothing human about making assumptions.

What you might be arguing against is that LLMs are not reasoning but merely predicting text. In that case they wouldn't make assumptions. If we were talking about GPT2 I would agree on that point. But I'm skeptical that is still true of the current generation of LLMs

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

#548

Post by degamad »

LasEspuelas wrote: post #437
jstummbillig wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You would never ask a human this question. Right?

We have a long tradition of asking each other riddles. A classic one asks, "A plane crashes on the border between France and Germany. Where do they bury the survivors?"

Riddles are such a big part of the human experience that we have whole books of collections of them, and even a Batman villain named after them.

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

#550

Post by stevage »

tim333 wrote: post #489
stevage wrote: post #441

This question is straightforward for humans. I have run into a weird edge case like this in my actual life which confused me. I'm in a band. After a concert, I have to drive back to the band room to drop off my instrument, then go to the pub for the post-concert drinks. The wrinkle is I live about 5 minutes walk from the band room, and about 5 minutes walk from the pub (and it's about 5 minutes walk between the two).…

Car at home avoids drink driving which is a plus.

I miss the days when I could drink enough for that to be a problem.
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