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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?

#161

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".

In fairness, they redefined it away from "just like a person" to "suitable for many different tasks".

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

#162
post #150
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…

humans without credentials are bad at basic algebra in a word problem, ergo the large language model must be substantially equivalent to a human without a credential

thanks but no thanks

i am often glad my field of endeavour does not require special professional credentials but the advent of "vibe coding" and, just, generally, unethical behavior industry-wide, makes me wonder whether it wouldn't be better to have professional education and licensing

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

#164
post #137

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…

What is the version used by the free chatgpt now? ( https://chatgpt.com/ ) > Since the car wash is only 50 meters away (about 55 yards), you should walk. > Here’s why: > - It’ll take less than a minute. > - No fuel wasted. > - Better for the environment. > - You avoid the irony of driving your dirty car 50 meters just to wash it. the last bullet point is amusing, it understands you intend to wash the car you drive bu…

By default for this kind of short question it will probably just route to mini, or at least zero thinking. For free users they'll have tuned their "routing" so that it only adds thinking for a very small % of queries, to save money. If any at all.

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

#165
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....

> 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…

Presumably the OP scare quoted "opinion" precisely to avoid having to get into this tedious discussion.

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

#167
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.

We know. We know these things aren't determination. We know.

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

#169

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…

Exactly, if an AI is able to curb around the basics, only then is it revolutionary

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

#170

Is part of the issue with this the AI’s basic assumption that you are asking a _sensible_ question?

I recently had a bug where I added some new logic which gave wrong output. I pasted the newly added code into various LLMs and told it the issue I was having.

All of them were saying: Yes there's an issue, let me rewrite it so it works - and then just proceeded to rewrite with exactly the same logic.

Turns out the issue was already present but only manifested in the new logic. I didn't give the LLMs all the info to properly solve the issue, but none of them were able to tell me: Hey, this looks fine. Let's look elsewhere.

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