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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?

#371

Post by raincole »

ibestvina wrote: post #364

There'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 j…

> No good reason to think "our human illusions" are fine, but "their AI illusions" make them useless.

I was about to argue that human illusions are fine because humans will learn the mistakes after being corrected.

But then I remember what online discussions over Monty Hall problem look like...

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

#372

Post by jasongi »

londons_explore wrote: post #206
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.

This is why we fed it the whole internet and every library as training data... By now it should know this stuff.

Future models know it now, assuming they suck in mastodon and/or hacker news.

Although I don't think they actually "know" it. This particular trick question will be in the bank just like the seahorse emoji or how many Rs in strawberry. Did they start reasoning and generalising better or did the publishing of the "trick" and the discourse around it paper over the gap?

I wonder if in the future we will trade these AI tells like 0days, keeping them secret so they don't get patched out at the next model update.

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

#373

Post by DharmaPolice »

pickleRick243 wrote: post #338
scott_w wrote: post #331

Earlier 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).

I think a good rule of thumb is to default to assuming a question is asked in good faith (i.e. it's not a trick question). That goes for human beings and chat/AI models.

In fact, it's particularly true for AI models because the question could have been generated by some kind of automated process. e.g. I write my schedule out and then ask the model to plan my day. The "go 50 metres to car wash" bit might just be a step in my day.

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

#374

Post by u1hcw9nx »

Gemini 3 fast

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That depends entirely on how much you enjoy a good comedic spectacle!

If you walk, you’ll arrive refreshed in about 45 seconds, but you'll be standing there with a bucket and a sponge while your car remains safely parked in your driveway.

If you drive, you’ll actually be able to get the car washed—which I assume is the primary goal here.

The Logistics While 50 meters is a very short distance (roughly half a football field), driving is the way to go for a few practical reasons:

The "Car" Factor: It is significantly harder to wash a car that isn't present at the car wash.

The Wet Interior: Even if you managed to carry your car there (impressive!), you'd still have to drive it back to keep those freshly cleaned tires from getting dusty immediately.

Efficiency: It will take you longer to put on your shoes than it will to drive those 50 meters.

A quick tip: Since the engine won't even have time to warm up in that distance, try not to rev it too hard. Just a gentle roll over to the bays will do.

Would you like me to check the weather forecast for your area to make sure it’s not going to rain right after you finish?

----

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

#375

Post by janlukacs »

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…

How much is the real (non-subsidized) cost of the "paid" plans? Does anyone in the world have an answer for this?

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

#376

Post by janlukacs »

ninjagoo wrote: post #265
TZubiri wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lots of "unwashed" scientists too.

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

#377

Post by mytailorisrich »

andy12_ wrote: post #317
mytailorisrich wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Another/newer/less restricted LLM may give a better answer but I don't think we can conclude that it 'understands' anything still.

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

#378

Post by grey-area »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #367
grey-area wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This particular situation is not in the training data, though I’m sure it will be soon to try to shore up claims of ‘reasoning’.

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

#379

Post by csomar »

andy12_ wrote: post #325
csomar wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Unless the LLM is a base model or just a finetuned base model, it definitely doesn't predict words just based on how likely they are in similar sentences it was trained on. Reinforcement learning is a thing and all models nowadays are extensively trained with it. If anything, they predict words based on a heuristic ensemble of what word is most likely to come next in similar sentences and what word is most likely to…

> If anything, they predict words based on a heuristic ensemble of what word is most likely to come next in similar sentences and what word is most likely to give a final higher reward.

So... "finding the most likely next word based on what they've seen on the internet"?

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

#380

Post by [deleted] »

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....

[deleted]
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