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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?

#261

Post by Agentlien »

ssl-3 wrote: post #199
jstummbillig wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The question is so outlandish that it is something that nobody would ever ask another human. But if someone did, then they'd reasonably expect to get a response consisting 100% of snark. But the specificity required for a machine to deliver an apt and snark-free answer is -- somehow -- even more outlandish? I'm not sure that I see it quite that way.

I've used a few facetious comments in ChatGPT conversations. It invariably misses it and takes my words at face value. Even when prompted that there's sarcasm here which you missed, it apologizes and is unable to figure out what it's missing.

I don't know if it's a lack of intellect or the post-training crippling it with its helpful persona. I suspect a bit of both.

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

#262

Post by dxdm »

j_maffe wrote: post #200
Jacques2Marais wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would be surprised, however, at how much detail humans also need to understand each other. We often want AI to just "understand" us in ways many people may not initially have understood us without extra communication.

Right. But, unlike AI, we are usually aware when we're lacking context and inquire before giving an answer.

Wouldn't that be nice. I've been party and witness to enough misunderstandings to know that this is far from universally true, even for people like me who are more primed than average to spot missing context.

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

#263

Post by ssl-3 »

shakna wrote: post #246
ssl-3 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is so outlandish that it is something that nobody would ever ask another human. But if someone did, then they'd reasonably expect to get a response consisting 100% of snark. But the specificity required for a machine to deliver an apt and snark-free answer is -- somehow -- even more outlandish? I'm not sure that I see it quite that way.

But the number of outlandish requests in business logic is countless. Like... In most accounting things, once end-dated and confirmed, a record should cascade that end-date to children and should not be able to repeat the process... Unless you have some data-cleaning validation bypass. Then you can repeat the process as much as you like. And maybe not cascade to children. There are more exceptions, than there are rul…

So, in human interaction: When the business logic goes wrong because it was described with a lack of specificity, then: Who gets blamed for this?

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

#264

Post by small_model »

Grok 4.1 (which is fairly old in LLM terms, 4.2 release imminent)

"You should drive. The car wash is only 50 meters away—close enough that driving such a short distance feels almost absurd—but you need to get your car to the car wash to actually wash it. Walking there without the car defeats the entire purpose. Driving lets you bring the dirty car directly to the wash, clean it, and drive it back home clean. Walking would leave the car behind, still dirty. So yes, start the engine and drive the 50 meters. It's the only practical option."

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

#265

Post by ninjagoo »

TZubiri wrote: post #239
ninjagoo wrote: post #234

I wonder if the providers are doing everyone, themselves included, a huge disservice by providing free versions of their models that are so incompetent compared to the SOTA models that these types of q&a go viral because the ai hype doesn't match the reality for unpaid users. And it's not just the viral questions that are an issue. I've seen people getting sub-optimal results for $1000+ PC comparisons from the free r…

I don't think 100% adoption is necessarily the ideal strategy anyways. Maybe 50% of the population seeing AI as all powerful and buying the subscription vs 50% of the population still being skeptics, is a reasonable stable configuration. 50% get the advantage of the AI whereas if everybody is super intelligent, no one is super intelligent. Their loss

Yes, but the 'unwashed' 50% have pitchforks.

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

#266

Post by jibal »

Saline9515 wrote: post #13

To be fair, many humans fail at the question "How would feel if you didn't have breakfast today?"

First, you completely flubbed the question, which is supposed to be phrased as a counterfactual. Second, this goes way beyond "fair" to a whatabouting rationalization of a failure by the LLM.

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

#268

Post by ahofmann »

jstummbillig wrote: post #230
Jacques2Marais wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would be surprised, however, at how much detail humans also need to understand each other. We often want AI to just "understand" us in ways many people may not initially have understood us without extra communication.

People poorly specifying problems and having bad models of what the other party can know (and then being surprised by the outcome) is certainly a more general albeit mostly separate issue.

This issue is the main reason why a big percentage of jobs in the world exist. I don't have hard numbers, but my intuition is that about 30% of all jobs are mainly "understand what side a wants and communicate this to side b, so that they understand". Or another perspective: almost all jobs that are called "knowledge work" are like this. Software development is mainly this. Side a are humans, side b is the computer. The main goal of ai seems to get into this space and make a lot of people superflous and this also (partly) explains why everyone is pouring this amount of money into ai.

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

#269

Post by gf000 »

TZubiri wrote: post #236

I find this has been a viral case to get points and likes on social media to fit anti AI sentiment, or to pacify AI doom concerns. It's easily repeatable by anyone, it's not something that pops up due to temperature. Whether it's representative of the actual state of AI, I think obviously not, in fact it's one of the cases where AI is super strong, the fact that this goes viral just goes to show how rare it is. This…

> the fact that this goes viral just goes to show how rare it is

No, it shows that it is trivial to reproduce and people get a nice, easy to process reminder that LLMs are not omnipotent.

Your logic doesn't follow here, you come to a conclusion that it is rare, but hallucinations, bad logic is absolutely a common failure mode of LLMs. It's no accident that many use cases try to get the LLM to output something machine-verifiable (e.g. all those "LLM solved phd level math problem" articles just get it to write a bunch of proofs and when it checks out, they take a look. So it's more of a "statistical answer generator" that may contain a correct solution next to a bunch of bullshit replies - and one should be aware of that)

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

#270

Post by nearbuy »

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…

I think part of the failure is that it has this helpful assistant personality that's a bit too eager to give you the benefit of the doubt. It tries to interpret your prompt as reasonable if it can. It can interpret it as you just wanting to check if there's a queue.

Speculatively, it's falling for the trick question partly for the same reason a human might, but this tendency is pushing it to fail more.

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