This is AGI
I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
361–370 of 998 posts
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#362Gemini fast > That is a classic "efficiency vs. logic" dilemma. Honestly, unless you’ve invented a way to teleport or you're planning on washing the car with a very long garden hose from your driveway, you’re going to have to drive. > While 50 meters is a great distance for a morning stroll, it’s a bit difficult to get the car through the automated brushes (or under the pressure washer) if you aren't behind the wheel…
“I live on Mars and I want to wash my car. My car is currently at home. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive on mars?”
Gemini Fast:
Drive. While 50 meters is a negligible distance on Earth, the Martian environment is hostile. If your car is a pressurized rover, driving allows you to stay in a temperature-controlled, shielded environment for as long as possible. Plus, navigating Martian "soil" is always safer on four wheels than two boots.
Pro:
In terms of general logistics for a distance of 50 meters—whether on Earth or in a hypothetical low-gravity environment—walking is almost always the more efficient choice.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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).
But you're ascribing understanding to the LLM, which is not what it's doing. If the LLM understood you, it would realise it's a trick question and, assuming it was British, reply with "You'd drive it because how else would you get it to the car wash you absolute tit."
Even the higher level reasoning, while answering the question correctly, don't grasp the higher context that the question is obviously a trick question. They still answer earnestly. Granted, it is a tool that is doing what you want (answering a question) but let's not ascribe higher understanding than what is clearly observed - and also based on what we know about how LLMs work.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#364There's a whole industry of "illusions" humans fail for: optical, word plays (including large parts of comedy), the Penn & Teller type, etc. Yet no one claims these are indicators that humans lack some critical capability.
Surface of "illusions" for LLMs is very different from our own, and it's very jagged: change a few words in the above prompt and you get very different results. Note that human illusions are very jagged too, especially in the optical and auditory domains.
No good reason to think "our human illusions" are fine, but "their AI illusions" make them useless. It's all about how we organize the workflows around these limitations.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#365Earlier 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…
I get that issue constantly. I somehow can't get any LLM to ask me clarifying questions before spitting out a wall of text with incorrect assumptions. I find it particularly frustrating.
In general spitting out a scrollbar of text when asked a simple question that you've misunderstood is not, in any real sense, a "chat".
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#366I'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…
> 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. If the car is already at the car wash then you can't possibly drive it there. So how else could you possibly drive there? Drive a different car to the car wash? And then return with two cars how, exactly? By calling your wife? Driving it back 50m and walking there and d…
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Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-state…
The answer is quite simple: It’s not in the training data. These models don’t think.
no, no, in this case, that's the thing, it is in the training data
just heavily (heavily!) biased towards walking
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#368ok I kind of disagree here with the assement, the models are actually intelligent enough to interpret "walk or drive" as the car ALREADY being there (otherwise why would you ask the question?? or having one of those pick up the car from carwash services), but they're also missing the context clue that "drive" means that their car is at their house - not the carwash.
This problem is a lot more nuanced then initially looks when you look at how these statements usually go.
Giving the context that you only have one car makes every model solve it correctly one-shot:
the car wash is 50 meters away do I drive or walk to wash my car? (I only have one car)
Walking is not practical if you need your car at the wash — you still have to drive it there anyway. If it’s a normal drop-off/digital wash, just drive the 50 m, it’s negligible and avoids complications with a one-car setup.
Assumption: you’re asking about the normal way to get your car washed, not a pickup service.
(5.3 codex spark)
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#369Earlier 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.
Given that an estimated 70% of human communication is non-verbal, it's not so surprising though.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#370LLM 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.
I feel safe when claude outputs dd commands that wipe your drive to benchmark disk write speed :)