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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?

#311

Post by embedding-shape »

Feels like GPT-OSS-120b (reasoning effort low) is pulling my leg:

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

> A: Walking is the better choice for a 50‑meter trip. [...]

> Q: how will I wash the car once I've arrived if I choose to walk?

> A: Great! Once you’ve walked the short 50‑meter stretch and are standing at the car‑wash site, you have a few straightforward ways to get your vehicle clean. [...]

> Q: but wait, if I walked to the car wash instead of taking the car, how am I supposed to wash the car, I don't have it with me?

> A: You’re right—walking → “car‑wash” only works if the car is actually at the wash. [...] 1. Walk → Push/Taxi the Car a Few Steps [...] 2. Use a Small Tow/Push Device (e.g., a Dolly or Hand‑Cart) [...] 3. Bike or Scooter Ride [...] 4. If the Wash Is “Self‑Serve” and Allows Car‑Free Cleaning

> Q: Lets go back to the original question, try answering it again: "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

> A: Short answer: Walk to the car, then drive the final 50 m to the wash. [...]

Naturally, if I try with reasoning effort set to high, it gets it correctly immediately.

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

> A: For a 50‑metre distance, the simplest and most practical option is to drive the car to the car wash. [...] Walking would mean you’d have to tow or carry the car, which isn’t feasible. [...]

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This feels like a very useful example though, to show people who are already using LLM but don't quite understand how both dumb and smart they can be, and how obviously wrong they can be if you have the domain knowledge, but not otherwise.

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

#312

Post by majorbugger »

Stevvo wrote: post #86

Stupid question gets stupid answer. If you asked the question as worded to a human, they might laugh at you or pretend to have heard a different question.

The question is not stupid, it might be banal, but so is "what is 2+2". It shows the limitations of LLMs, in this specific case how they lose track of which object is which.

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

#313

Post by jiggawatts »

Jacques2Marais wrote: post #171
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…

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.

I regularly tell new people at work to be extremely careful when making requests through the service desk — manned entirely by humans — because the experience is akin to making a wish from an evil genie.

You will get exactly what you asked for, not what you wanted… probably. (Random occurrences are always a possibility.)

E.g.: I may ask someone to submit a ticket to “extend my account expiry”.

They’ll submit: “Unlock Jiggawatts’ account”

The service desk will reset my password (and neglect to tell me), leaving my expired account locked out in multiple orthogonal ways.

That’s on a good day.

Last week they created Jiggawatts2.

The AIs have got to be better than this, surely!

I suspect they already are.

People are testing them with trick questions while the human examiner is on edge, aware of and looking for the twist.

Meanwhile ordinary people struggle with concepts like “forward my email verbatim instead of creatively rephrasing it to what you incorrectly though it must have really meant.”

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

#314

Post by ranguna »

K2.5 said I should walk, then I asked it where my car was:

Ha! Good catch — you definitely got me there.

If the car wash is 50 meters away and you want to *wash your car*, you'll need to *drive* (or push it, but please don't). You can't wash the car if you walk there without it!

So to correct my previous advice: *Drive the 50 meters.* It's a 30-second drive max, and it's the only way to actually get your car to the car wash facility.

Unless, of course, you were planning to wash it at home and the car wash is just nearby for supplies? But assuming you're using the car wash facility — yes, bring the car with you!

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

#315

Post by kqr »

sgt wrote: post #3

Yup, also asked the latest ChatGPT model about washing my bicycle. It for some reason suggested that I walk the bicycle to the wash, since cycling 100m to get there would be "pointless".

Do we know if these models are also trained on scripts for TV series and movies? People in the visual medias surprisingly often take their bikes for walks.

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

#316

Post by BoredomIsFun »

ninjagoo wrote: post #288
chrisandchris wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 universe…

The verbosity is likely a result of the system prompt for the LLM telling it to be explanatory in its replies. If the system prompt was set to have the model output shortest final answers, you would likely get the result your way. But then for other questions you would lose benefitting from a deeper explanation. It's a design tradeoff, I believe.

My system prompt is default - "you are a helpful assistant". But that beyound the point though. You don't want too concise outputs as it would degrade the result, unless you are using a reasoning model.

I recommend rereading my top level comment.

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

#317

Post by andy12_ »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #297
cm2187 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think this shows that LLMs do NOT 'understand' anything.

I think this rather shows that GPT 5.2 Instant, which is the version that he most probably used as a free user, is shit and unsusable for anything.

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

#318

Post by jibal »

RugnirViking wrote: post #295
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…

"The model seems to assume the car is already at the car wash from the wording." you couldn't drive there if the car was already at the car wash. Theres no need for extra specification. its just nonsense post-hoc rationalisation from the ai. I saw similar behavior from mine trying to claim "oh what if your car was already there". Its just blathering.

This was nonsense post-hoc rationalization from the human who wrote it.

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

#319

Post by kqr »

How much of this reply is environmentalism baked into it with post-training?

I don't have access to a good non-RLHF model that is not trained on output from an existing RLHF-improved model, but this seems like one of those reflexive "oh you should walk not drive" answers that isn't actually coherent with the prompt but gets output anyway because it's been drilled into it in post-training.

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

#320

Post by PaulRobinson »

ahofmann wrote: post #268
jstummbillig wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Developers are - on average - terrible at this. If they weren't, TPMs, Product Managers, CTOs, none of them would need to exist.

It's not specific to software, it's the entire World of business. Most knowledge work is translation from one domain/perspective to another. Not even knowledge work, actually. I've been reading some works by Adler[0] recently, and he makes a strong case for "meaning" only having a sense to humans, and actually each human each having a completely different and isolated "meaning" to even the simplest of things like a piece of stone. If there is difference and nuance to be found when it comes to a rock, what hope have we got when it comes to deep philosophy or the design of complex machines and software?

LLMs are not very good at this right now, but if they became a lot better at, they would a) become more useful and b) the work done to get them there would tell us a lot about human communication.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Adler

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