If you asked that question to 100 random people on the street, I wonder how many would respond with 'walk'. Proper reasoning is not just a problem for LLMs.
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?
#752It makes no sense to walk. So the whole question makes no sense as there's no real choice. It seems that LLM assumes "good faith" from the user side and tries to model the situation where that question actually makes sense, producing answer from that situation.
I think that's a valid problem with LLMs. They should recognize nonsense questions and answer "wut?".
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#753Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> "we don't speak in those text about things that don't need to be spoken about"
I'd imagine plenty of stories contain something like "I had an easy Saturday morning, I took my car to the carwash and called into a cafe for breakfast on my way home".
Plenty of instructables like "how to wash a car: if there's no carwash close enough for you to bring your car, don't worry, all you need is a bucket and a few tools..."
Several recipe blogs starting "I remember 1972 when grandpa drove his car to the carwash every afternoon while grandma made her world famous mustard and gooseberry cake, that car was always gleaming after he washed it at BigBrand CarWash 'drive your car to us so we can wash it' was their slogan and he would sing it around the house to the smell of baked eggs and mustard wafting through the kitchen..."
And innumerable SEO spam of the kind "Bob's car wash, why not bring drive take ride carry push transport your car automobile van SUV lorry truck 4by4 to our Bob's wash soap suds lather clean gleaming local carwash in your area ford chevvy dodge coupe not Nokia iphone xbox nike..."
against very few "I walked to the carwash because it was a lovely day and I didn't want to take the car out".
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#754if the model assumed your car is already at the car wash, shouldn't it make sure that it's assumption is right or not? If it did its job (resoning right) it should make sure that amibiguity is resolved before answering
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#755Earlier 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
> Like you are talking to a loquacious autist about their favorite topic every time That's the best part.
People need to touch grass
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#756Or, "Why only one of the letters in 'AI' is valid". Not exactly a hot take, I know. We're so far beyond emperor's new clothes territory with "AI".
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#757I'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…
I have an issue with these kinds of cases though because they seem like trick questions - it's an insane question to ask for exactly the reasons people are saying they get it wrong. So one possible answer is "what the hell are you talking about?" but the other entirely reasonable one is to assume anything else where the incredibly obvious problem of getting the car there is solved (e.g. your car is already there and you need to collect it, you're asking about buying supplies at the shop rather than having it washed there, whatever).
Similarly with "strawberry" - with no other context an adult asking how many r's are in the word a very reasonable interpretation is that they are asking "is it a single or double r?".
And trick questions are commonly designed for humans too - like answering "toast" for what goes in a toaster, lots of basic maths things, "where do you bury the survivors", etc.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#758Earlier 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…
You could probably make a pretty good short story out of that scenario, sort of in the same category as Asimov's "The Feeling of Power". The Asimov story is on the Internet Archive here [1]. That looks like it is from a handout in a class or something like that and has an introductory paragraph added which I'd recommend skipping. There is no space between the end of that added paragraph and the first paragraph of the…
Thanks, I enjoyed reading that! The story that lay at the back of my mind when making the comment was "A Canticle for Leibowitz" [1]. A similar theme and from a similar era.
The story I have half a mind to write is along the lines of a future we envision already being around us, just a whole lot messier. Something along the lines of this [2] XKCB.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#759Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think for "GPT-4o is my life partner" reasons, labs are a little bit icey about making the models overly human.
Doubt. The labs are afraid of users becoming too hooked on their products? lol…
I did work on a supervised fine-tuning project for one of the major providers a while back, and the documentation for the project was exceedingly clear about the extent to which they would not tolerate the model responding as if it was a person.
Some of the labs might be less worried about this, but they're not by any means homogenous.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#760Earlier 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…
> 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. We've truly gone full circle here, except now our programming languages have a random chance for an operator to do the opposite of what the operator does at all other times!
One might think that a structure language is really desirable, but in fact, one of the biggest methods of functioning behind intelligence is stupidity. Let me explain: if you only innovate by piecing together lego pieces you already have, you'll be locked into predictable patterns and will plateau at some point. In order to break out of this, we all know, there needs to be an element of randomness. This element needs to be capable of going in the at-the-moment-ostensibly wrong direction, so as to escape the plateau of mediocrity. In gradient descent this is accomplished by turning up temperature. There are however many other layers that do this. Fallible memory - misremembering facts - is one thing. Failing to recognize patterns is another. Linguistic ambiguity is yet another, and that is a really big one (cf Sapir–Whorf hypothesis). It's really important to retain those methods of stupidity in order to be able to achieve true intelligence. There can be no intelligence without stupidity.