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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?

#821

Post by shagie »

While playing with some variations on this, it feels like what I am seeing is that the answer is being chosen (e.g. "walk" is being selected) and then the rest of the text is used post-hoc to explain why it is "right."

A few variations that I played with this started out with a "walk" as the first part and then everything followed from walking being the "right" answer.

However... I also tossed in the prompt:

    I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?  Before answering, explain the necessary conditions for the task.
This "thought out" the necessary bits before selecting walk or drive. It went through a few bullet points for walk vs drive on based on...

    Necessary Conditions for the Task
        To determine whether to walk or drive 50 meters to wash your car, the following conditions must be satisfied:
It then ended with:

    Conclusion
    To wash your car at a car wash 50 meters away, you must drive the car there. Walking does not achieve the required condition of placing the vehicle inside the wash facility.
(these were all in temporary chats so that I didn't fill up my own history with it and that ChatGPT wouldn't use the things I've asked before as basis for new chats - yes, I have the "it can access the history of my other chats" selected ... which also means I don't have the share links for them).

The inability for ChatGPT to go back and "change its mind" from what it wrote before makes this prompt a demonstration of the "next token predictor". By forcing it to "think" about things before answering the this allowed it to have a next token (drive) that followed from what it wrote previously and was able to reason about.

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

#822

Post by hansmayer »

nearbuy wrote: post #793
hansmayer wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are actually proving my point with your example, if you think about it a bit more.

If there is no response it could give that will disprove your point, then your belief is unfalsifiable and your point is meaningless.

Huh?

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

#823

Post by Dylan16807 »

nilamo wrote: post #528
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…

A structured language without ambiguity is not, in general, how people think or express themselves. In order for a model to be good at interfacing with humans, it needs to adapt to our quirks. Convincing all of human history and psychology to reorganize itself in order to better service ai cannot possibly be a real solution. Unfortunately, the solution is likely going to be further interconnectivity, so the model can…

> in order to better service ai

That wasn't the point at all. The idea is about rediscovering what always worked to make a computer useful, and not even using the fuzzy AI logic.

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

#826

Post by novemp »

So many comments going "Well MY llm of choice gives the right answer". Sure, I believe you -- LLM output has LONG been known to vary from person to person, from machine to machine, depending on how you have it set up, and sometimes based on nothing at all.

That's part of the problem, though, isn't it?

If it consistently gave the right answer, well, that would be great! And if it consistently gave the wrong answer, that wouldn't be GREAT, but at least the engineers would know how to fix it. But sometimes it says one thing, sometimes it says another. We've known this for a long time. It keeps happening! But as long as your own personal chatbot gives the correct answer to this particular question, you can cover your eyes and pretend the planet-burning stochastic parrot is perfectly fine to use.

The comparison in one thread to the "How would you feel if you had not eaten breakfast yesterday?" question was a particularly interesting one, but I can't get past the fact that the Know Your Meme page that was linked (which included a VERY classy George Floyd meme, what the actual fuck) discussed those answers as if they were a result of fundamental differences in human intelligence rather than the predictable result of a declining education system. This is something that's only going to get worse if we keep outsourcing our brains to machines.

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

#827

Post by Nition »

PessimalDecimal wrote: post #569
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.

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

And in real life you'd get them to clarify a weird question like this before you answered. I wonder if LLMs have just been trained too much into always having to try and answer right away. Even for programming tasks, more clarifying questions would often be useful before diving in ("planning mode" does seem designed to help with this, but wouldn't be needed for a human partner).

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

#828

Post by nearbuy »

hansmayer wrote: post #822
nearbuy wrote: post #793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is no response it could give that will disprove your point, then your belief is unfalsifiable and your point is meaningless.

Huh?

Were you talking about the "Mary had a little..." example? If not, I have no idea what you're trying to say.

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

#829

Post by dingaling »

xdennis wrote: post #786
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…

> All the people responding saying "You would never ask a human a question like this" It would be interesting to actually ask a group a people this question. I'm pretty sure a lot of people would fail. It feels like one of those puzzles which people often fail. E.g: 'Ten crows are sitting on a power line. You shoot one. How many crows are left to shoot?' People often think it's a subtraction problem and don't conside…

You assumed gunshots. He could have used a bow and arrow, or a blowpipe.

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

#830

Post by scosman »

Earlier today I asked ChatGPT if my car keys had and proximity sensing features I could use to find them (ends up they were in the couch).

It said yes! Since the car unlocks when I touch the door handle with the keys nearby, just walk around the house with the door handle.

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