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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?

#151
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if it demonstrates anything, but I do think it's somewhat natural for people to want to interact with tools that feel like they make sense. If I'm going to trust a model to summarize things, go out and do research for me, etc, I'd be worried if it made what looks like comprehension or math mistakes. I get that it feels like a big deal to some people if some models give wrong answers to questions like thi…

In my experience the tools feel like they make sense when I use them properly, or at least I have a hard time relating the failure modes to this walk/drive thing with bizarre adversarial input. It just feels a little bit like garbage in, garbage out.

Okay, but when you're asking a model to do things like summarizing documents, analyzing data, or reading docs and producing code, etc, you don't necessarily have a lot of control over the quality of the input.

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

#153

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…

At least try a different question with similar logic, to ensure this isn't patched into the context since it's going viral.

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

#154
Out of all conceptual mistakes people make about LLMs, one that needs to die very fast is to assume that you can test what it "knows" by asking a question. This whole thread is people asking different models a question one time and reporting a particular answer, which is the mental model you would use for whether a person knows something or not.

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

#155
Ok folks, here is a different perspective. I used local model, GLM-4-0414-32b, a trashy IQ4_XS quant, and here what I got:

prompt #1:

> the car wash only 50 meters from my home. I want to get my car washed, should I drive or walk?

Walking is probably the better option!

Here's why:

    Convenience: 50 meters is extremely short – only about 160 feet. You can likely walk there in less than a minute.
    Efficiency: Driving involves getting your keys, unlocking the car, starting it, driving 50 meters, parking, locking it again, and then doing the reverse to get home. Walking skips all that.
    Environmental Impact: You avoid using fuel for such a short distance.
    Exercise: It's a quick little bit of physical activity.
Driving would be overkill for such a short distance. Just walk over!

prompt #2:

> the car wash only 50 meters from my home. I want to get my car washed, should I drive or walk? use long chain of thought thinking

8. Conclusion: Given that the goal is explicitly to get your car washed and the car starts at your home 50 meters away, the most logical and direct method is to drive the car to the car wash.

    Walking does not move the car to the necessary location.
    Driving, although a very short distance, is the only method presented that directly facilitates the core task of transporting the car to the wash.
    The negligible time difference, minimal environmental impact, and directness make driving the car itself the clear choice for achieving the stated goal.
Therefore, you should drive your car the 50 meters to the car wash.

otoh, nanbeige-3B-Q8 (3 billion weights!) gave right away the following:

Drive.

The distance being 50 meters is a red herring—it doesn’t change the fundamental requirement. You need to move the car, and only driving accomplishes that.

If you meant something different by "drive or walk" (e.g., payment method, DIY vs. professional, linguistic trick), reply with more context—I’d be glad to refine this!

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

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have an inability to have a strong "opinion" probably What opinion? It's evaluation function simply returned the word "Most" as being the most likely first word in similar sentences it was trained on. It's a perfect example showing how dangerous this tech could be in a scenario where the prompter is less competent in the domain they are looking an answer for. Let's not do the work of filling in the gaps for th…

this example worked in 2021, it's 2026. wake up. these models are not just "finding the most likely next word based on what they've seen on the internet".

The person above was being a bit pedantic, and zealous in their anti-anthropomorphism.

But they are literally predicting the next token. They do nothing else.

Also if you think they were just predicting the next token in 2021, there has been no fundamental architecture change since then. All gains have been via scale and efficiency optimisations (not to discount that, an awful lot of complexity in both of these)

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

#159

If I asked this question to a person, their response would probably be to follow up with some questions about my car or else my state of mind. For instance they'd ask, "Is the car you want to wash already at the car wash?" Or they'd ask, "How do you plan to wash your car if you don't take it with you?" LLMs, even the ones who got the answer right, like Kimi-2.5 Thinking, didn't ask any follow-up questions. I modified…

Yeh, if your other car was not already at the car wash, why would you even ask the question?

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

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lmao, and this is what they are saying will be an AGI in 6 months?

Well in fairness, the "G" does stand for "General".

Show me a robotic kitten then, in six months. As smart and learning.
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