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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?

#441

Post by stevage »

This question is straightforward for humans. I have run into a weird edge case like this in my actual life which confused me.

I'm in a band. After a concert, I have to drive back to the band room to drop off my instrument, then go to the pub for the post-concert drinks.

The wrinkle is I live about 5 minutes walk from the band room, and about 5 minutes walk from the pub (and it's about 5 minutes walk between the two). I can't carry my instrument on foot.

So...I have to drive to the band room. But if I then drive to the pub, I'd then have to drive home...two ridiculously short drives that make me sad. So I end up instead driving home, and then walking to the pub from there. Which seems weird...but less wrong somehow.

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

#442

Post by trueismywork »

stevage wrote: post #441

This question is straightforward for humans. I have run into a weird edge case like this in my actual life which confused me. I'm in a band. After a concert, I have to drive back to the band room to drop off my instrument, then go to the pub for the post-concert drinks. The wrinkle is I live about 5 minutes walk from the band room, and about 5 minutes walk from the pub (and it's about 5 minutes walk between the two).…

Not all humans, I can easily see myself being confused the question and assuming that the person is already at the car wash and this being some idealized physics scenario and then answering wrongly. But I did get a PhD in math, so may be that explains it?

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

#443

Post by ash_091 »

nicbou wrote: post #321
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…

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.

"If you're unsure, ask. Don't guess." in prompts makes a huge difference, imo.

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

#444

Post by YetAnotherNick »

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....

> Only most?!

I mean I can imagine a scenario where they have pipe of 50m which is readily available commercially?

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

#445

Post by kakacik »

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…

At work, paid gitlab duo (which is supposed to be a blend of various top models) gets more complex codebase hilariously wrong every time. Maybe our codebase is obscure for it (but it shouldn't be, standard java stuff with usual open source libs) but it just can't actually add value for anything but small snippets here and there.

For me litmus paper for any llm is flawless creation of complex regexes from a well formed prompt. I don't mean trivial stuff like email validation but rather expressions on limits of regex specs. Not almost-there, rather just-there.

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

#447

Post by NicuCalcea »

pu_pe wrote: post #154

Out of all conceptual mistakes people make about LLMs, one that needs to die very fast is to assume that you can test what it "knows" by asking a question. This whole thread is people asking different models a question one time and reporting a particular answer, which is the mental model you would use for whether a person knows something or not.

It's not a conceptual mistake when that's what's being advertised.

The onus is on AI companies to provide the service they promised, for example, a team of PhDs in my pocket [1]. PhDs know things.

1: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy5prvgw0r1o

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

#448

Post by plexicle »

silisili wrote: post #146
crimsonnoodle58 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what I got. Opus 4.6 (not Extended Thinking): Drive. You'll need the car at the car wash.

Am I the only one who thinks these people are monkey patching embarrassments as they go? I remember the r in strawberry thing they suddenly were able to solve, while then failing on raspberry.

Nah. It's just non-deterministic. I'm here 4 hours later and here's the Opus 4.6 (extended thinking) response I just got:

"At 50 meters, just walk. By the time you start the car, back out, and park again, you'd already be there on foot. Plus you'll need to leave the car with them anyway."

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

#449

Post by plexicle »

stingraycharles wrote: post #99
svara wrote: post #63

Earlier 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.

That’s without reasoning I presume?

4.6 Opus with extended thinking just now: "At 50 meters, just walk. By the time you start the car, back out, and park again, you'd already be there on foot. Plus you'll need to leave the car with them anyway."

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

#450

Post by dostick »

But first you must ask yourself - do you wash your car often enough, and maybe you should be choosing the car wash as your occupation? And maybe “50 meters” is the message here, that you’re in metric country living next to a car wash, its also pretty good that you’re not born in medieval times and very likely died within first year of your life…
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