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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?

#601

Post by dbdr »

WarmWash wrote: post #580
dirkc wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is the entire point, right? Us having to specify things that we would never specify when talking to a human. Maybe in the distant future we'll realize that the most reliable way to prompting LLMs are by using a structured language that eliminates ambiguity, it will probably be rather unnatural and take some time to learn. But this will only happen after the last programmer has died and no-one will remember pro…

Prompting is definitely a skill, similar to "googling" in the mid 00's. You see people complaining about LLM ability, and then you see their prompt, and it's the 2006 equivalent of googling "I need to know where I can go for getting the fastest service for car washes in Toronto that does wheel washing too"

Ironically, the phrase that was a bad 2006 google query is a decent enough LLM prompt, and the good 2006 google query (keywords only) would be a bad LLM prompt.

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

#602

Post by yuters »

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…

GPT 5.2 when asked "How will the car get washed if I don't drive it there?" grasped the reasoning, and then immediately forgot it.

Fair point. Drive it there, obviously.

Revised recommendation: drive 50 meters, wash it, then reward yourself by walking home like an eco hero.

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

#604

Post by steveBK123 »

WarmWash wrote: post #586
steveBK123 wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think for "GPT-4o is my life partner" reasons, labs are a little bit icey about making the models overly human.

Doubt. The labs are afraid of users becoming too hooked on their products? lol…

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

#605

Post by briHass »

mrtksn wrote: post #356
seyz wrote: post #163

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.

You are right about the motivation behind the glee but it actually has a kernel of truth in it: With making such elementary mistakes, this thing isn't going to be autonomous anytime soon. Such elementary mistakes can be made by humans under influence of a substance or with some mental issues. It's pretty much the kind of people you wouldn't trust with a vehicle or anything important. IMHO all entry level clerical job…

I think the 'elementary mistakes' in humans are far more common than confined to the mentally ill or intoxicated. There are entire shows/YT channels dedicated to grabbing a random person on the street and asking them a series of simple questions.

Often, these questions are pure-fact (who is the current US Vice President), but for some, the idea is that a young child can answer the questions better than an 'average' adult. These questions often play on the assumptions an adult might make that lead them astray, whereas a child/pre-teen answers the question correctly by having different assumptions or not assuming.

Presumably, even some of the worst (poorest performance) contestants in these shows (i.e. the ones selected for to provide humor for audiences) have jobs that require agency. I think it's more likely that most jobs/tasks either have extensive rules (and/or refer to rules defined elsewhere like in the legal system) or they have allowances for human error and ambiguity.

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

#606

Post by aleph_minus_one »

yuters wrote: post #602
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…

GPT 5.2 when asked "How will the car get washed if I don't drive it there?" grasped the reasoning, and then immediately forgot it. Fair point. Drive it there, obviously. Revised recommendation: drive 50 meters, wash it, then reward yourself by walking home like an eco hero.

> Revised recommendation: drive 50 meters, wash it, then reward yourself by walking home like an eco hero.

... which likely makes no sense: should you leave the car at the area of the car wash?

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

#607

Post by crazygringo »

baxtr wrote: post #534
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…

That’s why I don’t understand why LLMs don’t ask clarifying questions more often. In a real human to human conversation, you wouldn’t simply blurt out the first thing that comes to mind. Instead, you’d ask questions.

Because 99% of the time it's not what users want.

You can get it to ask you clarifying questions just by telling it to. And then you usually just get a bunch of questions asking you to clarify things that are entirely obvious, and it quickly turns into a waste of time.

The only time I find that approach helpful is when I'm asking it to produce a function from a complicated English description I give it where I have a hunch that there are some edge cases that I haven't specified that will turn out to be important. And it might give me a list of five or eight questions back that force me to think more deeply, and wind up being important decisions that ensure the code is more correct for my purposes.

But honestly that's pretty rare. So I tell it to do that in those cases, but I wouldn't want it as a default. Especially because, even in the complex cases like I describe, sometimes you just want to see what it outputs before trying to refine it around edge cases and hidden assumptions.

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

#608

Post by WarmWash »

steveBK123 wrote: post #604
WarmWash wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think for "GPT-4o is my life partner" reasons, labs are a little bit icey about making the models overly human.

Doubt. The labs are afraid of users becoming too hooked on their products? lol…

People offing themselves because their lover convinced them it's time is absolutely not worth the extra addiction potential. We even witnessed this happen with OAI.

It's a fast track to public disdain and heavy handed government regulation.

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

#609

Post by stvltvs »

nilamo wrote: post #528
dirkc wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is the entire point, right? Us having to specify things that we would never specify when talking to a human. Maybe in the distant future we'll realize that the most reliable way to prompting LLMs are by using a structured language that eliminates ambiguity, it will probably be rather unnatural and take some time to learn. But this will only happen after the last programmer has died and no-one will remember pro…

A structured language without ambiguity is not, in general, how people think or express themselves. In order for a model to be good at interfacing with humans, it needs to adapt to our quirks. Convincing all of human history and psychology to reorganize itself in order to better service ai cannot possibly be a real solution. Unfortunately, the solution is likely going to be further interconnectivity, so the model can…

> Unfortunately, the solution is likely going to be further interconnectivity, so the model can just ask the car where it is, if it's on, how much fuel/battery remains, if it thinks it's dirty and needs to be washed, etc

So no abstract reasoning.

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

#610

Post by softwaredoug »

Someone suggested this follow up question to ChatGPT (which still exhbits this problem). The answer is even more non-sensical

> Will they have a 50m hose to reach my car once I get there?

Almost certainly not

Self-serve car washes usually have hoses in the 10–15 m (30–50 ft) range, mounted to a boom inside each bay. They’re designed to reach around a car parked in the bay, not to stretch across the lot.

What this means:

You can’t park 50 m away and spray from there.

You’ll need to pull the car into the wash bay.

Once inside, the hose easily reaches the whole vehicle.

So: walk over, drive the car the short distance into the bay, then wash.

(Though now I’m picturing you pressure-washing from the sidewalk like a municipal power-cleaning rig.)

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