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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?

#861

Post by keeda »

jstummbillig wrote: post #147
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…

> 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…

The broad point about assumptions is correct, but the solution is even simpler than us having to think of all these things; you can essentially just remind the model to "think carefully" -- without specifying anything more -- and they will reason out better answers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47040530

When coding, I know they can assume too much, and so I encourage the model to ask clarifying questions, and do not let it start any code generation until all its doubts are clarified. Even the free-tier models ask highly relevant questions and when specified, pretty much 1-shot the solutions.

This is still wayyy more efficient than having to specify everything because they make very reasonable assumptions for most lower-level details.

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

#864

Post by yakbarber »

jmward01 wrote: post #680
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 i…

same things as the old, "what's heavier, a tonne of coal or a tonne of feathers". many, many people will say a ton a coal...

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

#865

Post by keeda »

tlogan wrote: post #469

This 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/

I got the "you should walk" answer 4 out of 5 times with free ChatGPT, until I told it to, basically, "think carefully": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47040530

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

#867

Post by godelski »

pvillano wrote: post #809
pvillano wrote: post #807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently asked an AI a chemistry question which may have an extremely obvious answer. I never studied chemistry so I can't tell you if it was. I included as much information about the situation I found myself in as I could in the prompt. I wouldn't be surprised if the ai's response was based on the detail that's normally important but didn't apply to the situation, just like the 50 meters

If you're curious or actually knowledgeable about chemistry, here's what happened. My apartment's dishwasher has gaps in the enamel from which rust can drip onto plates and silverware. I tried soaking but I presume to be a stainless steel knife with a drip of rust on it in citric acid. The rust turned black and the water turned a dark but translucent blue/purple. I know nothing about chemistry. My smartest move was t…

I'm a little confused by your question myself. Stainless steel rust should be that same brown color. Though it can get very dark when dried. Blue is weird but purple isn't an uncommon description, assuming everything is still dark and there's lots of sediment.

But what's the question? Are you trying to fix it? Just determine what's rusting?

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

#868

Post by roysting »

KronisLV wrote: post #486
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…

> 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…

This is a topic that I’ve always found rather curious, especially among this kind of tech/coding community that really should be more attuned to the necessity of specificity and accuracy. There seems to be a base set of assumptions that are intrinsic to and a component of ethnicities and cultures, the things one can assume one “wouldn’t never specify when talking to a human [of one’s own ethnicity and culture].”

It’s similar to the challenge that foreigners have with cultural references and idioms and figurative speech a culture has a mental model of.

In this case, I think what is missing are a set of assumptions based on logic, e.g., when stating that someone wants to do something, it assumes that all required necessary components will be available, accompany the subject, etc.

I see this example as really not all that different than a meme that was common among I think the 80s and 90s, that people would forget buying batteries for Christmas toys even though it was clear they would be needed for an electronic toy. People failed that basic test too, and those were humans.

It is odd how people are reacting to AI not being able to do these kinds of trick questions, while if you posted something similar about how you tricked some foreigners you’d be called racist, or people would laugh if it was some kind of new-guy hazing.

AI is from a different culture and has just arrived here. Maybe we’re should be more generous and humane… most people are not humane though, especially the ones who insist they are.

Frankly, I’m not sure it bodes well for if aliens ever arrive on Earth, how people would respond; and AI is arguably only marginally different than humans, something an alien life that could make it to Earth surely would not be.

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

#869

Post by RobMurray »

IanCal wrote: post #757
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…

I have an issue with these kinds of cases though because they seem like trick questions - it's an insane question to ask for exactly the reasons people are saying they get it wrong. So one possible answer is "what the hell are you talking about?" but the other entirely reasonable one is to assume anything else where the incredibly obvious problem of getting the car there is solved (e.g. your car is already there and…

strawberry isn't a trick question. llms jus don't sea letters like that. I just asked chatgpt how many Rs are in "Air Fryer" and it said two, one in air and one in fryer.

I do think it can be useful though that these errors still exist. They can break the spell for some who believe models are conscious or actually possess human intelligence.

Of course there will always be people who become defensive on behalf of the models as if they are intelligent but on the spectrum and that we are just asking the wrong questions.

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

#870

Post by gf000 »

TZubiri wrote: post #848
gf000 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the fact that this goes viral just goes to show how rare it is No, it shows that it is trivial to reproduce and people get a nice, easy to process reminder that LLMs are not omnipotent. Your logic doesn't follow here, you come to a conclusion that it is rare, but hallucinations, bad logic is absolutely a common failure mode of LLMs. It's no accident that many use cases try to get the LLM to output something machine…

If I tasked you to find a novel hallucination in a leading LLM, how long would it take you? I used to be able to find these and run into them often, but right now I can't generate new failure modes, I just have my list of known failures and run into them organically once every couple of weeks. I don't think anyone at this stage believes that they don't make mistakes, but we prefer to use them for the times they are u…

I agree with you here, especially regarding the reductionist view point.

My only gripe was that single sentence, and we might just mean something slightly different there.

Also, I'm out of my depth here, but I believe these sort of issues are solved in a post-training step, which may look more like applying a band-aid. I'm not convinced these issues can actually be fully fixed (due to the way these work) - but of course this tradeoff doesn't make LLMs useless, and it can be limited/eliminated via clever applications.

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