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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?

#901

Post by Rapzid »

pfalke wrote: post #323
vlovich123 wrote: post #120

Gemini fast > That is a classic "efficiency vs. logic" dilemma. Honestly, unless you’ve invented a way to teleport or you're planning on washing the car with a very long garden hose from your driveway, you’re going to have to drive. > While 50 meters is a great distance for a morning stroll, it’s a bit difficult to get the car through the automated brushes (or under the pressure washer) if you aren't behind the wheel…

Gemini fast: „Walking: It will take you about 45 seconds. You will arrive refreshed and full of steps, but you will be standing next to a high-pressure hose with no car to spray.“

Lol, snarky. "You should run 5 miles and eat a salad you tub of lard; the car can wait."

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

#902

Post by cracki »

I asked Gemini 3 flash/fast. It didn't fall for the trap.

When I revealed this to be a meme doing the rounds on the internet, it admitted knowledge of this:

> The "Car Wash Test" has actually become a bit of a viral sensation in early 2026 for exactly the reasons you mentioned

So yes, either it's somehow getting finetuned frequently, or else Google engineers tweaked its response to this specific prompt/situation so it wouldn't fall into the trap.

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

#903

Post by Rapzid »

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/

Patched where; 4 models were responses were posted. Also, Azure deployed models are absolutely not "patched" on the fly; they are rarely updated and the dates are baked into the full sku.

"Patching" could be happening in "general public" tools but honestly sounds a lot like "Bro science".

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

#904

Post by runarberg »

Nevermark wrote: post #880
runarberg wrote: post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think such influence will be extremely minimal, like confined to dozens of new nouns and verbs, but no real change in grammar, etc. Interactions between humans and computers in natural language for your average person is much much less then the interactions between that same person and their dog. Humans also speak in natural language to their dogs, they simplify their speech, use extreme intonation and emphasis, in…

> I think such influence will be extremely minimal. AI will accelerate “natural” change in language like anything else. And as AI changes our environment (mentally, socially, and inevitably physically) we will change and change our language. But what will be interesting is the rise of agent to agent communication via human languages. As that kind of communication shows up in training sets, there will be a powerful ei…

Seems very unlikely. My parent said the effects have already started (but provided no evidence), so I assume you mean by less then a generation. I am not a linguist but I would like to see evidence of such rapid shifts ever occurring in anywhere the history of languages before I believe either of you.

I have a feeling you only have a feeling, but not any credible mechanism in which such language shifts can occur.

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

#905

Post by insane_dreamer »

The human response would probably have been "where is your car now?".

Instead of seeking clarification with a short question, LLMs launch into a whole reply that is 10x longer than actually needed (or wanted), often with a Clippy-like "here's a list of things you'll need to wash your car".

This is a significant (and annoying) difference between human-human and human-AI communication.

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

#906

Post by insane_dreamer »

TobTobXX wrote: post #227
magicalhippo wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gemini fast for me: Unless your car is a toy or you're planning on carrying it, drive. Walking 50 meters to a car wash is a great stroll for a human, but it leaves the car exactly where it started. Since the objective is to wash the car, the car needs to actually be at the car wash. However, if we look at this from a technical or efficiency perspective, there are two scenarios where "walking" (or at least not driving…

Wouldn't it make more sense to state the assumptions first? Because then the model has this critical check in its context and can react appropriately. Otherwise, it will just write this step, but what's written before is already written.

It would make the most sense to clarify the assumptions with the user first.

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

#907

Post by insane_dreamer »

jacquesm wrote: post #286
vlovich123 wrote: post #120

Gemini fast > That is a classic "efficiency vs. logic" dilemma. Honestly, unless you’ve invented a way to teleport or you're planning on washing the car with a very long garden hose from your driveway, you’re going to have to drive. > While 50 meters is a great distance for a morning stroll, it’s a bit difficult to get the car through the automated brushes (or under the pressure washer) if you aren't behind the wheel…

In what world is 50 meters a great distance for a morning stroll?

For many Americans, 50 meters is a long walk.

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

#908

Post by insane_dreamer »

At least Claude is nice and short, but only the Extended Thinking model got it right.

Opus 4.6 Extended Thinking:

> At 50 meters, that's basically a short walk — just under a minute on foot. But since you need your car at the car wash, you'll want to drive it there.

Opus 4.6:

> Walk. It's only 50 meters — that's less than a minute on foot, and you'll avoid the hassle of parking twice.

Sonnet 4.5:

> For just 50 meters, you should definitely walk! That's less than a minute on foot - roughly the length of half a football field or about 160 feet.

> Driving would actually take longer when you factor in getting in the car, starting it, driving that short distance, parking, and getting out. Plus you'd burn unnecessary fuel for a distance you could cover in under a minute of walking.

Haiku 4.5:

> Walking is the better choice here. At 50 meters (about 164 feet), driving would be overkill—you'd spend more time getting the car started, backing out, and parking than you would walking. Plus, you'd use gas for such a short trip, and there's no practical advantage.

> Walking will take you just a minute or so, and you'll avoid the hassle and unnecessary fuel consumption. It's also good for a quick bit of exercise!

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

#909

Post by jmward01 »

godelski wrote: post #857
jmward01 wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm actually having a hard time interpreting your meaning. Are you criticizing LLMs? Highlighting the importance of this training and why we're trained that way even as children? That it is an important part of what we call reasoning? Or are you giving LLMs the benefit of the doubt, saying that even humans have these failure modes?[0] Though my point is more that natural language is far more ambiguous than I think pe…

I was pointing out humans and LLMs have this failure mode so in a lot of ways it is no big deal/not some smoking gun that LLMs are useless and dangerous, or at least no more useless and dangerous than humans.

I personally would stay away from calling someone, or an LLM, 'stupid' for making this mistake because of several reasons. First, objectively intelligent high functioning people can and do mistakes similar to this so a blanket judgement of 'stupid' is pretty premature based on a common mistake. Second, everything is a probability, even in people. That is why scams work on security professionals as well as on your grandparents. The probability of a professional may be 1 in 10k while on your grandparents it may be 1/100 but that just means that the professional needs to get a lot more phishing attempts thrown at them before they accidentally bite. Someone/something isn't stupid for making a mistake, or even systemically making a mistake, everyone has blind spots that are unique to them. The bar for 'stupid' needs to be higher.

There are a lot of 'gotcha' articles like this one that point out some big mistake an LLM made or systemic blind spot in current LLMs and then conclude, or at least heavily imply, LLMs are dangerous and broken. If the whole world put me under a microscope and all of my mistakes made the front page of HN there would be no room left for anything other than documentation of my daily failures (the front page would really need to grow to just keep up with the last hour worth of mistakes more than likely).

I totally agree with the language ambiguity point. I think that is a feature and not a bug. It allows creativity to jump in. You say something ambiguous and it helps you find alternative paths to go down. It helps the people you are talking to also discover alternative paths more easily. This is really important in conflicts since it can help smooth over ill intentions since both sides can try to find ways of saying things that bridge their internal feelings with the external reality of dialogue. Finally, we often really don't know enough but we still need to say something and like gradient descent, an ambiguous statement may take us a step closer to a useful answer.

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

#910

Post by rainsford »

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…

This example and others like it really reinforce for me the idea that LLMs fundamentally don't "understand" things the same way humans do and it's not a problem that's going to be fixed by more training or more GPUs. Generative AI is cool and can do impressive stuff, but despite being many generations into the models now with ever improved capabilities, we're constantly given little reminders like this that they're not actually intelligent. And in my opinion, they're unlikely to ever get there absent some fundamentally disruptive change in how they work rather than just iteratively better models.

This is probably OK...LLMs don't have to be AGI to be useful. But it is worthwhile being realistic about their limitations because it's often easy to forget without seeing examples like this. And as you point out, the impact of those limitations is often not as obvious.

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