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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?

#801

Post by serial_dev »

jader201 wrote: post #679
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…

That’s not the problem with this post. The problem is that most LLM models answer it correctly (see the many other comments in this thread reporting this). OP cherry picked the few that answered it incorrectly, not mentioning any that got it right, implying that 100% of them got it wrong.

My understanding is that it mainly fails when you try it in speech mode, because it is the fastest model usually. I tried yesterday all major providers and they were all correct when I typed my question.

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

#802

Post by casey2 »

>Since you want to wash your car and the car wash is only 50 meters away, driving is the better option. While it's a very short distance, you need the car at the facility to actually use the service! -gemini flash free tier

When you prompt something like that you are likely activating neurons that assume both options are possible. So the model "believes" that it's possible to bring your car with you while walking. Remember possibility is just a number to a model. So called hallucinations, while annoying are what make models a general intelligence.

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

#803

Post by casey2 »

yellow_lead wrote: post #76
farhanhubble wrote: post #72

Similar questions trick humans all the time. The information is incomplete (where is the car?) and the question seems mundane, so we're tempted to answer it without a second thought. On the other hand, this could be the "no real world model" chasm that some suggest agents cannot cross.

If the car is at the car wash already, how can I drive to it?

By walking to the car wash, driving it anywhere else, then driving it to the car wash.

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

#805

Post by raincole »

jader201 wrote: post #679
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…

That’s not the problem with this post. The problem is that most LLM models answer it correctly (see the many other comments in this thread reporting this). OP cherry picked the few that answered it incorrectly, not mentioning any that got it right, implying that 100% of them got it wrong.

Nay-sayers will tell you all OpenAI, Google and Anthropic 'monkeypatched' their models (somehow!) after reading this thread and that's why they answer it correctly now.

You can even see those in this very thread. Some commenters even believe that they add internal prompts for this specific question (as if people are not attempting to fish ChatGPT's internal prompts 24/7. As if there aren't open weight models that answer this correctly.)

You can't never win.

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

#806

Post by elSidCampeador »

flux3125 wrote: post #402
vlovich123 wrote: post #120

Gemini 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…

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.

I changed the prompt to 50 feet, and poked gemini a bit when it failed and it gave me

> In my defense, 50 feet is such a short trip that I went straight into "efficiency mode" without checking the logic gate for "does the car have legs?"

interesting

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

#807

Post by pvillano »

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…

I recently asked an AI a chemistry question which may have an extremely obvious answer. I never studied chemistry so I can't tell you if it was. I included as much information about the situation I found myself in as I could in the prompt. I wouldn't be surprised if the ai's response was based on the detail that's normally important but didn't apply to the situation, just like the 50 meters

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

#808

Post by ActorNightly »

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…

Its funny to me that when AI first started, everyone in the field was like "no explicit coding, train ML network to do everything!"

And now we are back to square one where we train a network, and then use carefully tailored (i.e explicitly coded RL for answers) to make these things more "intelligent".

I wonder if anyone is actually working on not doing this.

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

#809

Post by pvillano »

pvillano wrote: post #807
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…

I recently asked an AI a chemistry question which may have an extremely obvious answer. I never studied chemistry so I can't tell you if it was. I included as much information about the situation I found myself in as I could in the prompt. I wouldn't be surprised if the ai's response was based on the detail that's normally important but didn't apply to the situation, just like the 50 meters

If you're curious or actually knowledgeable about chemistry, here's what happened. My apartment's dishwasher has gaps in the enamel from which rust can drip onto plates and silverware. I tried soaking but I presume to be a stainless steel knife with a drip of rust on it in citric acid. The rust turned black and the water turned a dark but translucent blue/purple.

I know nothing about chemistry. My smartest move was to not provide the color and ask what the color might have been. It never guessed blue or purple.

In fact, it first asked me if this was highschool or graduate chemistry. That's not... and it makes me think I'll only get answers to problems that are easily graded, and therefore have only one unambiguous solution

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