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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?

#141

Post by karamanolev »

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 my output, one thing I got was

> Unless you are planning to carry the car on your back (not recommended for your spine), drive it over.

It got a light chuckle out of me. I previously mostly used ChatGPT and I'm not used to light humor like this. I like it.

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

#142

Post by yanis_t »

jaccola wrote: post #20

All of the latest models I've tried actually pass this test. What I found interesting was all of the success cases were similar to: e.g. "Drive. Most car washes require the car to be present to wash,..." Only most?! They have an inability to have a strong "opinion" probably because their post training, and maybe the internet in general, prefer hedged answers....

> Most car washes... I read it as slight-sarcasm answer

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

#143

Post by leptons »

fzeindl wrote: post #98
nettlin wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just now, with GPT 5.2 Thinking: > The car wash is only 50 meters from my house. I want to get my car washed. The car is at my house currently. Should I walk there or drive? > Walk. > > At 50 meters, walking is faster than the full “start car → pull out → reposition → park” cycle, avoids cold-start wear, and you won’t risk arriving with dusty brakes/tires or water streaks from immediately driving afterward. Drive onl…

Interesting experiment, this disproves my point, thank you.

>this disproves my point, thank you.

I feel like I've just witnessed a very rare and miraculous event on the internet.

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

#144

Post by aswegs8 »

peterspath wrote: post #56

Grok 4.1: Drive. 50 meters is nothing — literally a 30-second walk or a 10-second drive — but the key point is: your car isn’t going to wash itself. If you walk to the car wash, you arrive alone. The car stays parked at home, still dirty. If you drive, the car actually gets to the car wash and gets cleaned. So unless you’re planning to push the car the whole way (which is technically possible but ridiculous), the onl…

Wow, Grok directly switches to LinkedIn mode. Interesting - not surprising. Car washing? Easy as pie.

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

#145

Post by gf000 »

ainiriand wrote: post #69
colinhb wrote: post #21

Did not replicate for me w/ Opus 4.6: https://imgur.com/a/4FckOCL

It did for me in Spanish: https://imgur.com/a/p3gOOnG Perhaps different capabilities in different languages?

It's just not deterministic, even if you were to re-run the exact same prompt. Let alone with the system generated context that involves all the "memories" of your previous discussions.

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

#146

Post by silisili »

crimsonnoodle58 wrote: post #127
svara wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opus 4.6: Walk! At 50 meters, you'll get there in under a minute on foot. Driving such a short distance wastes fuel, and you'd spend more time starting the car and parking than actually traveling. Plus, you'll need to be at the car wash anyway to pick up your car once it's done.

That's not what I got. Opus 4.6 (not Extended Thinking): Drive. You'll need the car at the car wash.

Am I the only one who thinks these people are monkey patching embarrassments as they go? I remember the r in strawberry thing they suddenly were able to solve, while then failing on raspberry.

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

#147

Post by jstummbillig »

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 build separate mental models of the llm and are able to work around it).

This is a neatly isolated toy-case, which is interesting, because we can assume similar issues arise in more complex cases, only then it's much harder to reason about why something fails when it does.

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

#148

Post by tezza »

gf000 wrote: post #121
stingraycharles wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s without reasoning I presume?

Not the parent poster, but I did get the wrong answer even with reasoning turned on.

Thank you all! We needed further data points.

comparing one shot results is a foolish way to evaluate a statistical process like LLM answers. we need multiple samples.

for https://generative-ai.review I do at least three samples of output. this often yields very differnt results even from the same query.

e.g: https://generative-ai.review/2025/11/gpt-image-1-mini-vs-gpt...

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

#149

Post by jen729w »

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…

Opus 4.6 with thinking. Result was near-instant:

“Drive. You need the car at the car wash.”

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

#150

Post by Closi »

neya wrote: post #131

Yesterday someone on was yapping about how AI is enough to replace senior software engineers and they can just "vibe code their way" over a weekend into a full-fledged product. And that somehow finally the "gatekeeping" of software development was removed. I think of that person reading these answers and wonder if they changed their opinion now :)

Humans aren't immune to getting questions like this wrong either, so I don't think it changes much in terms of the ability of AI to replace jobs.

I've seen senior software engineers get tricked with the 'if YES spells yes, what does EYES spell?', or 'Say silk three times, what do cows drink?', or 'What do you put in a toaster?'.

Even if not a trick - lots of people get the 'bat and a ball cost £1.10 in total. The bat costs £1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?' question wrong, or '5 machines take 5 minutes to make 5 widgets. How long do 100 machines take to make 100 widgets?' etc. There are obviously more complex variants of all these that have even lower success rates for humans.

In addition, being PHD-Level in maths as a human doesn't make you immune to the 'toaster/toast' question (assuming you haven't heard it before).

So if we assume humans are generally intelligent and can be a senior software engineer, getting this sort of question confidently wrong isn't incompatible with being a competent senior software engineer.

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