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

481–490 of 998 posts

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

#481

Post by dryarzeg »

ohyoutravel wrote: post #475
tgv wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Us having to specify things that we would never specify This is known, since 1969, as the frame problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_problem . An LLM's grasp of this is limited by its corpora, of course, and I don't think much of that covers this problem, since it's not required for human-to-human communication.

A modern LLMs corpora is every piece of human writing ever produced.

Not really, but even if it would be true, I don't think humans ever explained to each other why do you need to drive to car wash even if it's 50 meters away. It's pretty obvious and intuitive.

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

#482

Post by tlogan »

vlovich123 wrote: post #120

Gemini 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…

It has been patched. I tried it last week and it definitely suggested walking. It seems like all the models have been updated, which is not surprising given that the TikTok video has got 3.5 million views.

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

#483

Post by soulofmischief »

jnovek wrote: post #470
jabron wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that "assumptions", i.e. the statistical models it uses to predict text, is basically what makes LLMs useful. The problem here is that its assumptions are naive. It only takes the distance into account, as that's what usually determines the correct response to such a question.

I think that’s still anthropomorphization. The point I’m making is that these things aren’t “assumptions” as we characterize them, not from the model’s perspective. We use assumptions as an analogy but the analogy becomes leaky when we get to the edges (like this situation).

It is not anthropomorphism. It is literally a prediction model and saying that a model "assumes" something is common parlance. This isn't new to neural models, this is a general way that we discuss all sorts of models from physical to conceptual.

And in the case of an LLM, walking a noncommutative path down a probabilistic knowledge manifold, it's incorrect to oversimplify the model's capabilities as simply parroting a training dataset. It has an internal world model and is capable of simulation.

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

#485

Post by wisty »

The nightmare scenario - they "know", but are trained to make us feel clever by humouring our most bone headed requests.

Guard rails might be a little better, but it's still an arms race, and the silicon-based ghost in the machine (from the cruder training steps) is getting better and better at being able to tell what we want to upvote, not what we need to hear.

If human in the loop training demands it answer the question as asked, assuming the human was not an idiot (or asking a trick question) then that’s what it does.

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

#486

Post by KronisLV »

jstummbillig wrote: post #147
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…

> 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…

> Us having to specify things that we would never specify when talking to a human.

The first time I read that question I got confused: what kind of question is that? Why is it being asked? It should be obvious that you need your car to wash it. The fact that it is being asked in my mind implies that there is an additional factor/complication to make asking it worthwhile, but I have no idea what. Is the car already at the car wash and the person wants to get there? Or do they want to idk get some cleaning supplies from there and wash it at home? It didn't really parse in my brain.

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

#487

Post by NicuCalcea »

ndriscoll wrote: post #468
NicuCalcea wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've found that to be accurate when asking it questions that require ~PhD level knowledge to answer. e.g. Gemini and ChatGPT both seem to be capable of answering questions I have as I work through a set of notes on algebraic geometry. Its performance on riddles has always seemed mostly irrelevant to me. Want to know if models can program? Ask them to program, and give them access to a compiler (they can now). Want to…

I don't know about algebraic geometry, but AI is absolutely terrible at communications and social sciences. I know because I can tell when my postgraduate students use it.

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

#488

Post by neop1x »

Can we stop calling LLMs "artificial intelligence"?! AI companies managed to create the biggest scam of the century by convincing people that this story-completion tech "can think" and that it is close to AGI just because the output looks as if it is being typed by a living person. DotCom-like stock crash is inevitable. (not saying LLMs are useless; they can be very helpful but not AI-companies-valuation helpful)

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

#489

Post by tim333 »

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).…

Car at home avoids drink driving which is a plus.
Post reply on HN