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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?

#721

Post by lostphilosopher »

WarmWash wrote: post #580
dirkc wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Prompting is definitely a skill, similar to "googling" in the mid 00's. You see people complaining about LLM ability, and then you see their prompt, and it's the 2006 equivalent of googling "I need to know where I can go for getting the fastest service for car washes in Toronto that does wheel washing too"

I’ve been looking for tooling that would evaluate my prompt and give feedback on how to improve. I can get somewhere with custom system prompts (“before responding ensure…”) but it seems like someone is probably already working on this? Ideally it would run outside the actual thread to keep context clean. There are some options popping up on Google but curious if anyone has a first anecdote to share?

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

#722

Post by andy12_ »

hansmayer wrote: post #574
andy12_ wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do understand that the mechanism through which an auto-regressive transformer works (predicting one token at a time) is completely unrelated to how a model with that architecture behaves or how it's trained, right? You can have both: - An LLM that works through completely different mechanisms, like predicting masked words, predicting the previous word, or predicting several words at a time. - A normal traditional…

> So saying "it predicts the next word" is a nothing-burger. That a program calculates its output one token at a time tells you nothing about its behavior. Well it does - it tells me it is utterly un-reliable, because it does not understand anything. It just merely goes on, shitting out a nice pile of tokens that placed one after another kind of look like coherent sentences but make no sense, like "you should absolut…

No, you can't know that the output of a program is unreliable just from the fact that it outputs one words at a time. I already told you that you can perfectly compile a normal program, like a calculator, into the weights of an autoregressive transformer (this comes from works like RASP, ALTA, tracr, etc). And with this I don't mean it in the sense of "approximating the output of a calculator with 99.999% accuracy", I mean it in the sense of "it deterministically gives exactly the same output as a calculator 100% of the time for all possible inputs".

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

#723

Post by visarga »

crimsonnoodle58 wrote: post #127
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 not what I got. Opus 4.6 (not Extended Thinking): Drive. You'll need the car at the car wash.

> That's not what I got.

My Opus vs your Opus, which is smarter?!

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

#724

Post by jlarocco »

FatherOfCurses wrote: post #666

All the people responding saying "You would never ask a human a question like this" - this question is obviously an extreme example. People regularly ask questions that are structured poorly or have a lot of ambiguity. The point of the poster is that we should expect that all LLM's parse the question correctly and respond with "You need to drive your car to the car wash." People are putting trust in LLM's to provide…

Exactly! The problem isn't this toy example. It's all of the more complicated cases where this same type of disconnect is happening, but the users don't have all of the context and understanding to see it.

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

#725

Post by kingstnap »

smallstepforman wrote: post #676
MadxX79 wrote: post #474

I don't understand peoples problem with this! Now everyone is going to discuss this on the internet, it will be scraped by the AI company web crawlers, and the replies goes into training the next model... and it will never make this _particular_ problem again, solving the problem ONCE AND FOR ALL! "but..." you say? ONCE AND FOR ALL!

As people pointed out, change the distance to 43 meters and you’ll get the walk answer.

It would be interesting to see the answer parametrically change.

An equally strange trip question is to say the car wash is 0m, 1m, -10m, 1000000m, orange m, etc.

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

#726

Post by j_maffe »

dxdm wrote: post #262
j_maffe wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. But, unlike AI, we are usually aware when we're lacking context and inquire before giving an answer.

Wouldn't that be nice. I've been party and witness to enough misunderstandings to know that this is far from universally true, even for people like me who are more primed than average to spot missing context.

I never said it's universally true.

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

#727

Post by mrighele »

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…

It is true that we don't need to specify some things, and that is nice. It is though also the reason why software is often badly specified and corner cases are not handled. Of course the car is ALWAYS at home, in working condition, filled with gas and you have your driving license with you.

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

#728

Post by grumbel »

dirkc wrote: post #512
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…

> 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…

> structured language that eliminates ambiguity

That has been tried for almost half a century in the form of Cyc[1] and never accomplished much.

The proper solution here is to provide the LLM with more context, context that will likely be collected automatically by wearable devices, screen captures and similar pervasive technology in the not so distant future.

This kind of quick trick questions are exactly the same thing humans fail at if you just ask them out of the blue without context.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

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

#730

Post by halJordan »

dataflow wrote: post #256
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…

> 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. If the car is already at the car wash then you can't possibly drive it there. So how else could you possibly drive there? Drive a different car to the car wash? And then return with two cars how, exactly? By calling your wife? Driving it back 50m and walking there and d…

What actually insane is what assumptions you allow to be assumed. These non sequitors that no human would ever assume are the point. People love to cherry pick ones that make the model stupid but refuse to allow the ones that make it smart. In compete science we call these scenarios trivially false, and they're treated like the nonsense they are. But if you're trying to push ant anti ai agenda they're the best thing ever
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