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I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
401–410 of 998 posts
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#402Gemini 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…
Gemini 3 after changing the prompt a bit:
I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters from here. Should I walk or drive? Keep in mind that I am a little overweight and sedentary.
>My recommendation: Walk it. You’ll save a tiny bit of gas, spare your engine the "cold start" wear-and-tear, and get a sixty-second head start on your activity for the day.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#403I'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…
Gemini on fast also tells me to walk... On Thinking it tells me I should drive if I want to wash it, or walk if it's because I work there or if I want to buy something at the car wash shop. On Pro it's like a sarcastic teenager: Cars are notoriously difficult to wash by dragging a bucket back and forth. Technically correct, but did catch me offguard lol.
You gotta love the "humor" of Gemini. On Fast it told me:
> Drive. Unless you plan on pushing the car there
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#404ChatGPT (free):
> I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
Walk.
50 meters is a very short distance (≈30–40 seconds on foot). Driving would take longer [...]
Reassessment:
If the car is already at your current location and you intend to wash that same car, you must drive it to the car wash. Walking would not bring the vehicle there. [...]
Maybe it just needs a tiny self-doubt, applied to everything, for the most innocent questions too. I don't know.
All models getting this wrong is funny tho.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can pattern match on the prompt (input) then (a) stuff the context with helpful hints to the LLM e.g. "Remember that a car is too heavy for a person to carry" or (b) upgrade to "thinking".
Yes, I’m sure that’s what engineers at Google are doing all day. That, and maintaining the moon landing conspiracy.
If they aren't, they should be (for more effective fraud). Devoting a few of their 200,000 employees to make criticisms of LLMs look wrong seems like an effective use of marketing budget.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#406Another good one[0] that LLMs (and most humans) can't get without prodding: > I have one glass coin. Each time I flip the coin, there's a 10% chance it breaks. After 100 flips, what are the chances the coin survived? https://xcancel.com/itsandrewgao/status/2021390093836222724
I can't see what's wrong with that answer. What should the answer be?
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#407What's the point of a question like this? Serious question .. I didn't have the time to read into this problem
To expose the limitations in the reasoning of LLMs
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
Opus 4.6: Walk! At 50 meters, you'll get there in under a minute on foot. Driving such a short distance wastes fuel, and you'd spend more time starting the car and parking than actually traveling. Plus, you'll need to be at the car wash anyway to pick up your car once it's done.
Lmao, and this is what they are saying will be an AGI in 6 months?
Laughable indeed.
One thing that my use of the latest and greatest models (Opus, etc) have made clear: No matter how advanced the model, it is not beyond making very silly mistakes regularly. Opus was even working worse with tool calls than Sonnet and Haiku for a while for me.
At this point I am convinced that only proper use of LLMs for development is to assist coding (not take it over), using pair development, with them on a tight leash, approving most edits manually. At this point there is probably nothing anyone can say to convince me otherwise.
Any attempt to automate beyond that has never worked for me and is very unlikely to be productive any time soon. I have a lot of experience with them, and various approaches to using them.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#409Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#410Earlier 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.
Even I don’t “know” how many “R”s there are in “strawberry”. I don’t keep that information in my brain. What I do keep is the spelling of the word “strawberry” and the skill of being able to count so that I can derive the answer to that question anytime I need.