Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

mastodon.world

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 998 posts

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

#331

Post by scott_w »

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.

> You would be surprised, however, at how much detail humans also need to understand each other.

But in this given case, the context can be inferred. Why would I ask whether I should walk or drive to the car wash if my car is already at the car wash?

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

#332

Post by zkry »

seyz wrote: 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.

At least this Schadenfreude is better than the Schadenfreude AI boosters get when people are made redundant to AI. I can totally see some people getting warm fuzzies, scolling Tiktok, watching people crying having lost not only their job, but their entire career.

Im not even exaggerating, you can see these types of comments on social media

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

#333

Post by sneak »

jaccola wrote: 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....

There are car wash services that will come to where your car is and wash it. It’s not wrong!

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

#334

Post by scott_w »

jiggawatts wrote: post #313
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.

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: “Unloc…

There's a lot of overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans. However, we would want our tools to be more useful than the dumbest humans...

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

#335

Post by gwd »

oytis wrote: post #293

I am moderately anti-AI, but I don't understand the purpose of feeding them trick questions and watching them fail. Looks like the "gullibility" might be a feature - as it is supposed to be helpful to a user who genuinely wants it to be useful, not fight against a user. You could probably train or maybe even prompt an existing LLM to always question the prompt, but it would become very difficult to steer it.

But this one isn't like the "How many r's in strawberry" one: The failure mode, where it misses a key requirement for success, is exactly the kind of failure mode that could make it spend millions of tokens building something which is completely useless.

That said, I saw the title before I realized this was an LLM thing, and was confused: assuming it was a genuine question, then the question becomes, "Should I get it washed there or wash it at home", and then the "wash it at home" option implies picking up supplies; but that doesn't quite work.

But as others have said -- this sort of confusion is pretty obvious, but a huge amount of our communication has these sorts of confusions in them; and identifying them is one of the key activities of knowledge work.

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

#336

Post by globular-toast »

Man, the quality of these comments is absolutely dire. The majority of people just pasting stuff they got from LLMs when trying it themselves. Totally uninteresting, lazy and devoid of any thought/intelligence. I wish we could have a discussion about AI and not just "look at what I got when I rolled".

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

#338

Post by pickleRick243 »

scott_w wrote: post #331
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.

> You would be surprised, however, at how much detail humans also need to understand each other. But in this given case, the context can be inferred. Why would I ask whether I should walk or drive to the car wash if my car is already at the car wash?

But also why would you ask whether you should walk or drive if the car is at home? Either way the answer is obvious, and there is no way to interpret it except as a trick question. Of course, the parsimonious assumption is that the car is at home so assuming that the car is at the car wash is a questionable choice to say the least (otherwise there would be 2 cars in the situation, which the question doesn't mention).

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

#339

Post by throwaway5465 »

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…

GPT told me to walk as there'd be no need to find parking at the car wash.

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

#340

Post by tsimionescu »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #296
tsimionescu wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My first instinct was, I had underspecified the location of the car. The model seems to assume the car is already at the car wash from the wording. GPT 5.x series models behave a bit more on the spectrum so you need to tell them the specifics. This makes little sense, even though it sounds superficially convincing. However, why would a language model assume that the car is at the destination when evaluating the dif…

> However, why would a language model assume that the car is at the destination when evaluating the difference between walking or driving? Why not mention that, it it was really assuming it? Because it assumes it's a genuine question not a trick.

If it's a genuine question, and if I'm asking if I should drive somewhere, then the premise of the question is that my car is at my starting point, not at my destination.
Post reply on HN