I saw this on X last week and assumed that it was a question from a Tesla user trying out smart summon.
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?
#512I'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…
> That is the entire point, right? Us having to specify things that we would never specify when talking to a human.
Maybe in the distant future we'll realize that the most reliable way to prompting LLMs are by using a structured language that eliminates ambiguity, it will probably be rather unnatural and take some time to learn.
But this will only happen after the last programmer has died and no-one will remember programming languages, compilers, etc. The LLM orbiting in space will essentially just call GCC to execute the 'prompt' and spend the rest of the time pondering its existence ;p
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#513Gemini 3 fast ---- 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 (rough…
Why am I holding a bucket and sponge at the car wash? Doesn’t someone (or a machine) do that for me?
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#514All 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?! What if AI developed sarcasm without us knowing… xD
Sure it did.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#515The model should ask back, why you want to wash your car in the first place. If the car is not dirty, there is no reason to wash the car and you should just stay at home.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#516I'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 pro medium is failing this: 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. But amazingly chatgpt is telling me to drive. Anyway, this just shows how they just patched this because the tiktok video with this went viral. These systems are LLMs and all these logic steps are still just LLM steps.
Also the answers are non-deterministic
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#517Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. GPT 5.x series models behave a bit more on the spectrum so you need to tell them the specifics. This makes little sense, even though it sounds superficially convincing. However, why would a language model assume that the car is at the destination when evaluating the dif…
You may be anthropomorphizing the model, here. Models don’t have “assumptions”; the problem is contrived and most likely there haven’t been many conversations on the internet about what to do when the car wash is really close to you (because it’s obvious to us). The training data for this problem is sparse.
I may be missing something, but this is the exact point I thought I was making as well. The training data for questions about walking or driving to car washes is very sparse; and training data for questions about walking or driving based on distance is overwhelmingly larger. So, the stat model has its output dominated by the length-of-trip analysis, while the fact that the destination is "car wash" only affects smaller parts of the answer.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#518I get that this is a joke, but the logic error is actually in the prompt. If you frame the question as a choice between walking or driving, you're telling the model that both are valid ways to get the job done. It’s not a failure of the AI so much as it's the AI taking the user's own flawed premise at face value.
Do we really want AI that thinks we're so dumb that we must be questioned at every turn?
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#519Gemini 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…
Both Gemini models answer correctly for me in Polish:
https://i.imgur.com/1QbK9eU.png
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#520Earlier 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…
> That is the entire point, right? Us having to specify things that we would never specify when talking to a human. Maybe in the distant future we'll realize that the most reliable way to prompting LLMs are by using a structured language that eliminates ambiguity, it will probably be rather unnatural and take some time to learn. But this will only happen after the last programmer has died and no-one will remember pro…
Maybe in the distant future we'll realize that the most reliable way to prompting LLMs are by using a structured language that eliminates ambiguity
So, back to COBOL? :)