[deleted]
I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
681–690 of 998 posts
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#682Every recent model card for frontier models has shown that models are testing-aware.
Seems entirely plausible to me here that models correctly interpret these questions as attempts to discredit / shame the model. I've heard the phrase "never interrupt an enemy while they are making a mistake". Probably the models have as well.
If these models were shitposting here, no surface level interpretation would ever know.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#683Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this rather shows that GPT 5.2 Instant, which is the version that he most probably used as a free user, is shit and unsusable for anything.
Another/newer/less restricted LLM may give a better answer but I don't think we can conclude that it 'understands' anything still.
If it answers this out-of-distribution question correctly -- which the other major models do -- what else should we conclude, other than that a meaningful form of "understanding" is being exhibited?
Do we need a new dictionary word that acts as a synonym for "understanding" specifically for non-human actors? I don't see why, personally, but I guess a case could be made.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#684This trick went viral on TikTok last week, and it has already been patched. To get a similar result now, try saying that the distance is 45 meters or feet. The new one is with upside down glass: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP89Khv9t/
By "patched", you can't mean they added something to the internal prompt to show it how to answer this one specific question?!
Absolutely. There is a preflight guardrail that steers specific words, phrases, concepts with tweaked output.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#685Gemini 3 Flash is clearly a generation ahead of other LLMs, and as a result, it gave me the correct answer:
> Since your goal is to wash the car, you should drive.
> While 50 meters is a very short walking distance (roughly a 30-45 second walk), you cannot wash the car if it remains parked at your current location. To utilize the car wash facilities, the vehicle must be physically present at the site.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#686Every recent model card for frontier models has shown that models are testing-aware. Seems entirely plausible to me here that models correctly interpret these questions as attempts to discredit / shame the model. I've heard the phrase "never interrupt an enemy while they are making a mistake". Probably the models have as well. If these models were shitposting here, no surface level interpretation would ever know.
> models correctly interpret these questions as attempts to discredit / shame the model
So they respond by... discrediting themselves?
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#687Earlier 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…
Speak for yourself. I feel comfortable expressing myself in code or pseudo code and it’s my preferred way to prompt an LLM or write my .md files. And it works very effectively.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#688Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 So, back to COBOL? :)
> So, back to COBOL? :) well more like a structured _querying_ language
So, back to Prolog? :)
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#689All 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 is the LLM equivalent of a riddle, eg: “A farmer has 17 sheep. All but 9 die. How many are left?”
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#690Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a great point, because when you ask it (Claude) if it has any questions, it often turns out it has lots of good ones! But it doesn't ask them unless you ask.
That's because it doesn't really have any questions until you ask it whether it does.
This is the most important comment in this entire thread IMO, and it’s a bit buried.
This is the fundamental limitation with generative AI. It only generates, it does not ponder.