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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?

#181

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 invo…

What I relly dislike about these LLM is how verbose they get even for such a short, simple question. Is it really necessary to have such a lobg answer and who's going to read that one anyway?

Maybe it's me and may character but when human gets that verbose for a question that can be answered with "drive, you need the car" I would like to just walk away halfway through the answer to not having to hear all the universes history just to get an answer. /s

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

#182
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't understand this approach. How are you going to convince customers-to-be by demoing an inferior product?

The good news for them is that all their competitors have the exact same issue, and it's unsolvable.

And to an extent holds for lots of SaaS products, even non-AI.

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

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No doubt about it, and there's no reason to suspect this can only ever apply to embarassing minor queries, either.

Even beyond model alignment, it's not difficult to envision such capabilities being used for censorship, information operations, etc.

Every major inference provider more or less explicitly states in their consumer ToS that they comply with government orders and even share information with intelligence agencies.

Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, etc are all one national security letter and gag order away from telling you that no, the president is not in the Epstein files.

Remember, the NSA already engaged in an unconstitutional criminal conspiracy (as ruled by a federal judge) to illegally conduct mass surveillance on the entire country, lie about it to the American people, and lie about it to congress. The same organization that used your tax money to bribe RSA Security to standardize usage of a backdoored CSPRNG in what at the time was a widely used cryptographic library. What's the harm in a little bit of minor political censorship compared to the unconstitutional treason these predators are usually up to?

That's who these inference providers contractually disclose their absolute fealty to.

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

#184
post #163

LLM failures go viral because they trigger a "Schadenfreude" response to automation anxiety. If the oracle can't do basic logic, our jobs feel safe for another quarter. Wrong.

The funny thing is this thread has become a commercial for thinking mode and probably would result in more token consumption, and therefore more revenue for AI companies.

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

#185

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…

GLM 5.0: > You should *drive*. > Here is why: > If you walk to the car wash, you will arrive there empty-handed. Since your car is still at home, you won't have anything to wash. > While driving 50 meters is a very short trip (and technically not great for a cold engine), it is the only way to get the car to the car wash to complete your goal. Kimi K2.5: > You should drive, but with an important caveat. > Since your…

> seem to be fine

Now repeat the question to the same model in different contexts several times and count what percentage of the time it’s correct.

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

#186
This seems clickbait? Gemini answers:

Method,Logistical Requirement Automatic/Tunnel,The vehicle must be present to be processed through the brushes or jets. Self-Service Bay,The vehicle must be driven into the bay to access the high-pressure wands. Hand Wash (at home),"If the ""car wash"" is a location where you buy supplies to bring back, walking is feasible." Detailing Service,"If you are dropping the car off for others to clean, the car must be delivered to the site."

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

#187
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't understand this approach. How are you going to convince customers-to-be by demoing an inferior product?

Because they have too many free users that will always remain on the free plan, as they are the "default" LLM for people who don't care much, and that is a enormous cost. Also the capabilities of their paid tiers are well known to enough people that they can rely on word of mouth and don't need to demo to customers-to-be

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

#188

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…

But what is it about this specific question that puts it at the edges of what LLM can do? .. That, it's semantically leading to a certain type of discussion, so statistically .. that discussion of weighing pros and cons .. will be generated with high chance.. and the need of a logical model of the world to see why that discussion is pointless.. that is implicitly so easy to grasp for most humans that it goes un-stated .. so that its statistically un-likely to be generated..

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

#189

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".

Unless LLMs architecture have changed, that is exactly what they are doing. You might need to learn more how LLMs work.

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

#190
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't understand this approach. How are you going to convince customers-to-be by demoing an inferior product?

It's all trade offs. The router works most of the time so most free users get the expensive model when necessary.

They lost x% of customers and cut costs by y%. I bet y is lots bigger than x.

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