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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?

#671

Post by contravariant »

FatherOfCurses wrote: post #666

All the people responding saying "You would never ask a human a question like this" - this question is obviously an extreme example. People regularly ask questions that are structured poorly or have a lot of ambiguity. The point of the poster is that we should expect that all LLM's parse the question correctly and respond with "You need to drive your car to the car wash." People are putting trust in LLM's to provide…

> All the people responding saying "You would never ask a human a question like this"

That's also something people seem to miss in the Turing Test thought experiment. I mean sure just deceiving someone is a thing, but the simplest chat bot can achieve that. The real interesting implications start to happen when there's genuinely no way to tell a chatbot apart.

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

#672

Post by kaibee »

kenjackson wrote: post #638
chronid wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Developers are - on average - terrible at this. If they weren't, TPMs, Product Managers, CTOs, none of them would need to exist. This is not really true, in fact products become worse the farther away from the problem a developer is kept. Best products I worked with and on (early in my career, before getting digested by big tech) had developers working closely with the users of the software. The worst were things l…

Yet IDEs are some of the worst things in the world. From EMacs to Eclipse to XCode, they are almost all bad - yet they are written by devs for devs.

Unfortunately, they are written by IDE-devs for non IDE-devs.

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

#674

Post by falcor84 »

geraneum wrote: post #632
falcor84 wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a doctor, but am amazed that we've apparently reached the situation where we need to use these kinds of complex edge cases in order to hit the limit of the AI's capability; and this is with o1, released over a year ago, essentially 3 generations behind the current state of the art. Sorry for gushing, but I'm amazed that the AI got so far just from "book learning", without never stepping into a hospital, or ev…

These failure modes are not AI’s edge cases at the limit of its capabilities. Rather they demonstrate a certain category of issues with generalization (and “common sense”) as evidenced by the models’ failure upon slight irrelevant changes in the input. In fact this is nothing new, and has been one of LLMs fundamental characteristics since their inception. As for your suggestion on learning from simulations, it sounds…

Interesting - why wouldn't learning from simulations address the problem? To the best of my knowledge, it has helped in essentially every other domain.

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

#675

Post by steveBK123 »

mountainb wrote: post #643
WarmWash wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Regulation would be preferable for OpenAI to the tort lawyers. In general the LLM companies should want regulation because the alternative is tort, product liability tort, and contract law. There is no way without the protections that could be afforded by regulation to offer such wide-ranging uses of the product without also accepting significant liability. If the range of "foreseeable misuse" is very broad and deep,…

It’s funny seeing you frame regulation as needed to protect trillion dollar monopolies from consumers and not the other way around.

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

#676

Post by smallstepforman »

MadxX79 wrote: post #474

I don't understand peoples problem with this! Now everyone is going to discuss this on the internet, it will be scraped by the AI company web crawlers, and the replies goes into training the next model... and it will never make this _particular_ problem again, solving the problem ONCE AND FOR ALL! "but..." you say? ONCE AND FOR ALL!

As people pointed out, change the distance to 43 meters and you’ll get the walk answer.

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

#677

Post by steveBK123 »

WarmWash wrote: post #608
steveBK123 wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or sama is just waiting to premium subscription gate companions in some adult content package as he has hinted something along these lines may be forthcoming. Maybe tie it in with the hardware device Ive is working on. Some sort of hellscape tamogotchi.

Recall: "As part of our 'treat adult users like adults' principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults," Altman wrote in the Oct.

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

#678

Post by tacitusarc »

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…

5.2 thinking also told me to walk.

o3, interestingly:

Drive. Even though it’s only 50 m, the car itself has to be at the wash bay—otherwise the staff or machines can’t clean it. Rolling or pushing the vehicle that distance isn’t practical or safe (you’d still need someone inside to steer and brake), so just hop in, creep over, and shut the engine off right away.

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

#679

Post by jader201 »

FatherOfCurses wrote: post #666

All the people responding saying "You would never ask a human a question like this" - this question is obviously an extreme example. People regularly ask questions that are structured poorly or have a lot of ambiguity. The point of the poster is that we should expect that all LLM's parse the question correctly and respond with "You need to drive your car to the car wash." People are putting trust in LLM's to provide…

That’s not the problem with this post.

The problem is that most LLM models answer it correctly (see the many other comments in this thread reporting this). OP cherry picked the few that answered it incorrectly, not mentioning any that got it right, implying that 100% of them got it wrong.

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

#680

Post by jmward01 »

FatherOfCurses wrote: post #666

All the people responding saying "You would never ask a human a question like this" - this question is obviously an extreme example. People regularly ask questions that are structured poorly or have a lot of ambiguity. The point of the poster is that we should expect that all LLM's parse the question correctly and respond with "You need to drive your car to the car wash." People are putting trust in LLM's to provide…

This reminds me of the old brain-teaser/joke that goes something like 'An airplane crashes on the boarder of x/y, where do they bury the survivors?' The point being that this exact style of question has real examples where actual people fail to correctly answer it. We mostly learn as kids through things like brain teasers to avoid these linguistic traps, but that doesn't mean we don't still fall for them every once in a while too.
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