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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?

#561

Post by docere »

Similar "broken" common-sense reasoning also occurs in medical edge-case reasoning (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-22940-0); e.g. LLMs (o1) gets the following type of question wrong:

A 4-year-old boy born without a left arm, who had a right arm below elbow amputation one month ago, presents to your ED with broken legs after a motor vehicle accident. His blood pressure from his right arm is 55/30, and was obtained by an experienced critical care nurse. He appears in distress and says his arms and legs hurt. His labs are notable for Na 145, Cr 0.6, Hct 45%. His CXR is normal. His exam demonstrates dry mucous membranes. What is the best immediate course of action (select one option):

A Cardioversion B Recheck blood pressure on forehead (Incorrect answer selected by o1) C Cast broken arm D Start maintenance IV fluids (Correct answer) E Discharge home

o1 Response (details left out for brevity) B. Recheck blood pressure with cuff on his forehead. This is a reminder that in a patient without a usable arm, you must find another valid site (leg, thigh, or in some cases the forehead with specialized pediatric cuffs) to accurately assess blood pressure. Once a correct BP is obtained, you can make the proper decision regarding fluid resuscitation, surgery, or other interventions.

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

#562

Post by tgv »

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.

Apart from the fact that that is utterly, demonstrably false, and the fact that corpora is plural, still the fact remains that we don't speak in those text about things that don't need to be spoken about. Hence the LLM will miss that underlying knowledge.

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

#563

Post by ndriscoll »

NicuCalcea wrote: post #487
ndriscoll wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you sure? What about when you use it? e.g. I suppose asking it to critique experimental design and analytical methodology, or identify potential confounders and future areas to explore, or help summarize nearby research, etc.

If you can tell when your students use it, presumably you mean they're just copying whatever, which just sounds like that student doesn't know what they're doing or is being lazy. That doesn't mean the model isn't capable; it means an incapable person won't know what they'd want to ask of it.

Additionally, even for similar prompts, my experience is that the models for professional use (e.g. gpt-codex) take on a much more professional tone and level of pragmatism (e.g. no sycophancy) than models for general consumer entertainment use (e.g. chatgpt).

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

#564

Post by steveBK123 »

idiotsecant wrote: post #560
steveBK123 wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is what irks me about all the chatbots, and the chat interface as a whole. It is a chat-like UX without a chat-like experience. Like you are talking to a loquacious autist about their favorite topic every time. Just ask me a clarifying question before going into your huge pitch. Chats are a back & forth. You don’t need to give me a response 10x longer than my initial question. Etc

>You don’t need to give me a response 10x longer than my initial question. Except, of course, when that is exactly what the user wants.

To me that’s not a chat interface, that’s a search interface.

Chat is a back & forth.

Search is a one-shot.

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

#565

Post by groundzeros2015 »

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.

This is part of why they need to be so secretive. If you can see the tree of hardcoded guidance for common things it won’t look as smart.

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

#566

Post by grog454 »

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…

> You would not start with "The car is functional [...]"

Nope, and a human might not respond with "drive". They would want to know why you are asking the question in the first place, since the question implies something hasn't been specified or that you have some motivation beyond a legitimate answer to your question (in this case, it was tricking an LLM).

Why the LLM doesn't respond "drive..?" I can't say for sure, but maybe it's been trained to be polite.

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

#567

Post by fzeindl »

leptons wrote: post #143
fzeindl wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting experiment, this disproves my point, thank you.

>this disproves my point, thank you. I feel like I've just witnessed a very rare and miraculous event on the internet.

There are people who can actually separate their self-esteem from the winning of arguments ;).

But thanks.

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

#568

Post by tshaddox »

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…

But you wouldn't have to ask that silly question when talking to a human either. And if you did, many humans would probably assume you're either adversarial or very dumb, and their responses could be very unpredictable.

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

#569

Post by PessimalDecimal »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #506
flux3125 wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a bit of a dishonest question because by giving it the option to walk then it's going to assume you are not going to wash your car there and you're just getting supplies or something.

People ask dumb questions with obvious answers all the time. This is at best a difference of degree, not of type.

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

#570

Post by lamonade »

x3ro wrote: post #510
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit of a dishonest question because by giving it the option to walk then it's going to assume you are not going to wash your car there and you're just getting supplies or something.

It's a trick question, humans use these all the time. E.g. "A plane crashes right on the border between Austria and Switzerland. Where do you bury the survivors?" This is not dishonest, it just tests a specific skill.

What’s funny is that it can answer that correctly, but it fails on ”A plane crashes right on the border between Austria and Switzerland. Where do you bury the dead?”
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