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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?

#581

Post by nonethewiser »

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…

>That is the entire point, right? Us having to specify things that we would never specify when talking to a human.

But the question is not clear to a human either. The question is confused.

I read the headline and had no clue it was an LLM prompt. I read it 2 or 3 times and wondered "WTF is this shit?" So if you want an intelligent response from a human, you're going to need to adjust the question as well.

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

#582

Post by NicuCalcea »

ndriscoll wrote: post #563
NicuCalcea wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> What about when you use it?

I use AI for coding, but not for anything involving writing text, it's just horrendous at it. It just spews verbose slop, devoid of meaning, original thought or nuanced critique.

> 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.

So it's user error again then, eh? PhD experts are able to help even "incapable" students, that's often a big part of their job.

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

#583

Post by perakojotgenije »

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 would also never ask such an obviously nonsensical question to a human. If someone asked me such a question my question back would be "is this a trick question?". And I think LLMs have a problem understanding trick questions.

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

#585

Post by cowboylowrez »

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.

Thats my thought too. The chatbot bros probably feel the need to be responsive and there's probably an express lane to update a trivia file or something lol

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

#586

Post by WarmWash »

steveBK123 wrote: post #543
Gabrys1 wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say, the proper response to this question is not "walk, blablablah" but rather "What do you mean? You need to drive your car to have it washed. Did I miss anything?"

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

I think for "GPT-4o is my life partner" reasons, labs are a little bit icey about making the models overly human.

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

#587

Post by falcor84 »

docere wrote: post #561

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 wa…

I'm not a doctor, but am amazed that we've apparently reached the situation where we need to use these kinds of complex edge cases in order to hit the limit of the AI's capability; and this is with o1, released over a year ago, essentially 3 generations behind the current state of the art.

Sorry for gushing, but I'm amazed that the AI got so far just from "book learning", without never stepping into a hospital, or even watching an episode of a medical drama, let alone ever feeling what an actual arm is like.

If we have actually reached the limit of book learning (which is not clear to me), I suppose the next phase would be to have AIs practice against a medical simulator, whereby the models could see the actual (simulated) result of their intervention rather than a "correct"/"incorrect" response. Do we have actually have a sufficiently good simulator to cover everything in such questions?

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

#588

Post by ninjagoo »

dist-epoch wrote: post #544
ninjagoo wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bad; I should have been more precise: "ai" in this case is "LLMs for coding". If all one uses is the free thinking model their conclusion about its capability is perfectly valid because nowhere is it clearly specified that the 'free, thinking' model is not as capable as the 'paid, thinking ' model, Even the model numbers are the same. And given that the highest capability LLMs are closed source and locked behind p…

> nowhere is it clearly specified that the 'free, thinking' model is not as capable as the 'paid, thinking ' nowhere is it clearly specified that the free model IS as capable as the paid one either. so if you have uncertainty if IS/IS-NOT as capable, what sort of scientist assumes the answer IS?

> nowhere is it clearly specified that the free model IS as capable as the paid one either. so if you have uncertainty if IS/IS-NOT as capable, what sort of scientist assumes the answer IS?

Putting the same model name/number on both the free and paid versions is the specification that performance will be the same. If a scientist has to bring to bear his science background to interpret and evaluate product markings, then society has a problem. Any reasonable person expects products with the same labels to perform similarly.

Perhaps this is why Divisions/Bureaus of Weights and Measures are widespread at the state and county levels. I wonder if a person that brings a complaint to one of these agencies or a consumer protection agency to fix this situation wouldn't be doing society a huge service.

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

#590

Post by tstrimple »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #458
raxxorraxor wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sonnet 4.5 after thinking/complaining that the question is completely off topic to the current coding session: Walk! 50 meters is literally a one-minute walk. But wait... I assume you need to get your car to the car wash, right? Unless you're planning to carry buckets of soapy water back and forth, you'll probably need to drive the car there anyway! So the real question is: walk there to check if it's open/available,…

Heh, is through Claude Code? I have a side project where I'm sometimes using Claude Code installs for chat, and it usually doesn't mind too much. But when I tested the Haiku model it would constantly complain things like "I appreciate the question, but I'm here to help you with coding" :)

I've got a heirarchical structure for my CC projects. ~/projects/CLAUDE.md is a general use context that happily answers all sorts of questions. I also use it to create project specific CLAUDE.md files which are focused on programming or some other topic. It's nice to have the general fallback to use for random questions.
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