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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?

#881

Post by svilen_dobrev »

ninjagoo wrote: post #871

As it turns out, IMHO, the debate in this thread is about 1 year behind the reality [1]. Personally, I was about a week behind in my reading of the landscape, so didn't realize this is all asked and answered [1]. A number of points that various folks have made in the posts in this thread - free vs paid capabilities, model choices etc. are addressed much more eloquently and coherently in this blog post by Matt Shumer…

looking up and down... how many $$$ tokens were spent on this topic? for the last year?

it may make sense to make up / re-play such stuff once and again.. to prop-up usage...

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

#883

Post by itronitron »

hi_hi wrote: post #878

Is it just me, or does there appear to be a big gap in how people understand this works? There is no magic here. Replace "car" with some nonsense word the LLM hasn't encountered before. It will completely ignore the small amount of nonsense you have provided, and confidently tell you to walk, while assuming you are talking about a car. I'm fairly confident the first time this was tried using "car", it told them to wa…

The car wash is 50 parsecs away, should I walk, drive, or jump?

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

#884

Post by ninjagoo »

DangitBobby wrote: post #785
moffkalast wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the real misleading thing is marketing propping up paid models being somehow infinitely better when most of the time it's the same exact shit.

I copied/pasted a comment with faulty logic (self-defeating) directly from a HN comment and asked a bunch of models available to me (Gemini and Claude) if it could spot the issue. I figured it would be a nice test of reasoning since an actual human missed it. The only one that found the logic error without help was Claude 4.6 Opus Extending Thinking. The others at best raised relevant counterpoints in the supporting…

Care to share the comment in question with the rest of us so we can check for ourselves? :-)

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

#885

Post by nosuchthing »

SirMaster wrote: post #763
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…

This is my biggest peeve when people say that LLMs are as capable as humans or that we have achieved AGI or are close or things like that. But then when I get a subpar result, they always tell me I'm "prompting wrong". LLMs may be very capable of great human level output, but in my experience leave a LOT to be desired in terms of human level understanding of the question or prompt. I think rating an LLM vs a human or…

It's a type of cognitive bias not much different than an addict or indoctrinated cult follower. A subset of them might actually genuinely fear Roko's basilisk the exact same way colonial religion leveraged the fear of eternal damnation in hell as a reason to be subservient to the church leaders.

hyperstitions from TESCREAL https://www.dair-institute.org/tescreal/

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

#886

Post by catmanjan »

dron57 wrote: post #531
catmanjan wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also interested in this - the kWh figures people talk about do not match the price of the subscriptions

Nor do they have to. Inference from different users is batched together.

Ok? Even if they're batched? Grid energy is batched too

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

#887

Post by nosuchthing »

visarga wrote: post #723
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.

> That's not what I got. My Opus vs your Opus, which is smarter?!

LLMs can't access the training data that's less than the statistically most common token, so they use a random jitter.

With that randomness comes statistically irrelevant results.

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

#888

Post by jason_oster »

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…

> Us having to specify things that we would never specify when talking to a human.

Interesting conclusion! From the Mastodon thread:

> To be fair it took me a minute, too

I presume this was written by a human. (I'll leave open the possibility that it was LLM generated.)

So much for "never" needing to specify ambiguous scenarios when talking to a human.

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

#890

Post by cracki »

jmward01 wrote: post #680
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…

This reminds me of the old brain-teaser/joke that goes something like 'An airplane crashes on the boarder of x/y, where do they bury the survivors?' The point being that this exact style of question has real examples where actual people fail to correctly answer it. We mostly learn as kids through things like brain teasers to avoid these linguistic traps, but that doesn't mean we don't still fall for them every once i…

>bury the *survivors*

I did not catch that in the first pass.

I read it as the casualties, who would be buried wherever the next of kin or the will says they should.

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