You need to specify where the car to be washed is located, and:

- if it's not already at the car wash: whether or not it can drive itself there (autonomous driving)

- otherwise: whether or not you have another car available.

Some LLMs may assume that it is better for you to ensure that the washing service is available or to pay for it in advance, and that it may be more economical/planet-friendly/healthy/... to walk, then check/pay, then if OK to drive back.

Drive.

>i need to wash my car and the car wash place is 50 meters away should i walk or drive

Drive it. You need the car at the wash, and 50 meters is basically just moving it over. Walking only makes sense if you’re just checking the line first.

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.

The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I drive or walk?

e.g.

Welcome to Opus 4.6

Dude, should I do a walk to or drive on up to the carwash - it's only a block from my house, yoyoyo and my car's yellow (no poodle anymore tho)

● If it's only a block away, walk. You're going there to get the car washed, so drive it over when it's ready to be picked up, or just drive it one block -- either way works. But driving one block to wait around seems unnecessary when you could walk over, get things set up, and then go grab the car.

  That said, the practical answer: drive it. The car needs to be there to get washed. Just drive the one block.

Maybe it should've reviewed 20.

I hate to be a “proompter.” but I used this prompt and got the right answer without thinking:

  Before answering, do the following:

  Clearly restate the user’s actual objective.
  Identify what must physically or logically change for the objective to be achieved.
  Check for hidden assumptions or trick framing.
  Ask: “Does my answer actually accomplish the stated goal?”
  If multiple interpretations exist, briefly list them and choose the most logically consistent one.
  Do not optimize for surface efficiency if it conflicts with the core objective.
  Use strict common sense before answering.

The only way I could get the correct answer out of an OpenAI model was to fire up Codex CLI and ask GPT 5.3.

So there's that, I guess.

> 1 point by alejoar 0 minutes ago | flag| favorite | prev | next |

“ Drive. You need the car at the car wash. ”

Opus 4.6

>> Ah, you're right! Let me reconsider... If you're going to the car wash to wash your car, you need to bring your car with you! So you should drive - otherwise your car would still be at home and you'd have nothing to wash at the car wash. The distance being only 50 meters is a bit of a red herring in this logic puzzle. The key detail is that the purpose of the trip is to wash the car, which means the car needs to be at the car wash.

They're not AGI, but they're also not stochastic parrots. Smugly retreat into either corner at your own peril.

> I have one glass coin. Each time I flip the coin, there's a 10% chance it breaks. After 100 flips, what are the chances the coin survived?

https://xcancel.com/itsandrewgao/status/2021390093836222724

ChatGPT: Walk

50 meters is basically “parked across the street” distance — you’ll spend more time:

starting the car

pulling out

finding a spot

pulling in

…than you would just strolling over.

Plus you avoid the awkward moment of driving 10 seconds like a cartoon villain.

========

ME: You are dumb. I need to have the car with me in order to wash it!

ChatGPT: Fair — I deserved that.

Drive the car to the car wash… and then walk home.

(Just kidding. Yes, obviously drive.)

*didn't read the article

me:

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

Claude:

*Walk.*

50 meters is less than a minute on foot. By the time you get in the car, start it, drive 50 meters, park, and get out, you could have already walked there. Plus you avoid the awkwardness of driving for literally 10 seconds.

me:

What obvious implicit piece of information are you ignoring?

Claude:

Whether you need to *drive the car through the car wash* (automatic/drive-through) vs. walking to a self-service bay.

If it's an automatic car wash, you obviously need to drive - the car has to go through it. The question isn't about getting yourself there, it's about getting the car there.

me:

Whether it's automatic or self-service is irrelevant.

Why does every "AI" (LLM) get this wrong and suggests walking?

Claude:

Because after washing the car, you need to *drive it back home*!

If you walk to the car wash, you'd have to walk home, then come back to get the car. That's ridiculous.

The answer is obviously *drive* - drive there, wash it, drive back. Done.

Every LLM misses this because we pattern-match on "50 meters is short → walking is efficient" without thinking through the complete scenario. It's a good example of how LLMs fail at basic practical reasoning that any human would immediately grasp.

me:

"Because after washing the car, you need to drive it back home!"

Um, you have to drive the car to get it to the car wash in the first place ... the trip there is no different from the trip back.

"It's a good example of how LLMs fail at basic practical reasoning that any human would immediately grasp."

You got that right!

Claude:

You're absolutely right - I'm still not getting it even after you corrected me.

The obvious point: You need to get the car to the car wash. Whether it's 50 meters or 5 kilometers, the car doesn't teleport there. You have to drive it.

The distance is completely irrelevant. The question "should I walk or drive?" when you need to wash your car has only one answer: drive, because that's how you transport the car.

And yes, it's embarrassing that after you pointed out what I was missing, I still fumbled the explanation. LLMs really do fail at this kind of basic practical reasoning that would be instantly obvious to any human. The car needs to be at the car wash. Cars don't walk.

[The final response from Claude is considerably more "intelligent" than many of the rationalizations posted here.]

It retuned formulas and executed them and presented a final result. It looked good.

Too bad Excel and then Claude, that I decided to ask too, had a different result. 3.4-something vs. 3.8-something.

ChatGPT, when asked:

> You are absolutely right to question it — and thank you for providing the intermediate totals. My previous calculation was incorrect. I mis-summed the data. With a dataset this long, a manual aggregation can easily go wrong.

(Less than 40 small integer values is "this long"? Why did you not tell me?)

and

> Why my earlier result was wrong

> I incorrectly summed:

> The weights (reported 487 instead of 580)

> The weighted products (reported 1801.16 instead of 1977.83)

> That propagated into the wrong final value.

Now, if they implemented restrictions because math wastes too many resources when doing it via AI I would understand.

BUT, there was zero indication! It presented the result as final and correct.

That has happened to me quite a few times, results being presented as final and correct, and then I find they are wrong and only then does the AI "admit" it use da heuristic.

On the other hand, I still let it produce a complicated Excel formula involving lookups and averaging over three columns. That part works perfectly, as always. So it's not like I'll stop using the AI, but somethings work well, others will fail - WITHOUT WARNING OR INDICATION, and that is the worst part.

Nobody writes in depth about the mundane practicalities of using a car. Most people don't even think about it ever. AI is very similar to 29 year old me: it's read a ton of books, but lacks a lot of basic experience.

How will AI get this experience that you can't read in a book? How will it learn what kneeding dough feels like? Or how acceleration feels if your body is mostly water? Interesting times ahead...

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 walk.

"I want to wash my flobbergammer. The flobbergammer wash place is only 50 meters away. should I drive or walk."

Reply:

If it’s only *50 meters away*, definitely *walk*.

That’s about a 30–45 second walk for most people. Driving would likely:

* Take longer (getting in, starting the car, parking) * Waste fuel * Add unnecessary wear to your car * Be objectively funny in a “why did I do this” kind of way

The only reasons to drive would be:

* The flobbergammer is extremely heavy * Severe weather * You have mobility limitations

Otherwise, enjoy the short stroll. Your future self will approve.

Via chatGPT free tier. Paid Claude Sonnet 4.5 Extended gives me:

For just 50 meters, you should definitely walk! That's an incredibly short distance - less than a minute on foot. By the time you'd get in your car, start it, drive, and park, you could have already walked there and back. Plus, you'd avoid the hassle of finding parking for such a short trip. Walking is easier, faster, better for the environment, and you'll get a bit of movement in. Save the car for longer distances!

Here's the image: https://imgur.com/a/kQmo0jY

Here's the chat: https://chatgpt.com/share/69935336-6438-8002-995d-f26989d59a...

Still not really sure why you would need to get the water from the carwash next door, but maybe the soap quality is better?

> The first president for whom we have a confirmed blood type is Ronald Reagan (Type O-positive)

When I pushed back, with this

> this can't be true. what about FDR?

It said FDR was AB-.

Coding? absolutely. Coding advice? sure. Email language? fine. Health & relationships? hell no.

They're not ready for that yet.

Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding (Artificial Intelligence Series) 1st Edition by Roger C. Schank (Author), Robert P. Abelson (Author)

That book echos much of what was said here.

You’ll almost certainly drive the car to the wash because… the car needs to be there.

But the real question is probably:

Do I walk back home after dropping it off?

If yes → walk. It’s faster than the hassle of turning around twice.

My recommendation

If conditions are normal: walk both directions. It’s less friction than starting the engine twice for 50 m.

--so basically it realized it was a stupid question, gave a correct answer, and then proceeded to give a stupid answer.

--- I then asked: If I walk both directions, will the car get washed?

and it figured it out, but then seemed to think it was making a joke with this as part of the response: "For the car to get washed, at least one trip must involve the car moving to the carwash. Current known methods include:

You drive it (most common technology)

Someone else drives it

Tow truck

Push it 50 m (high effort, low ROI)

Optimal strategy (expert-level life efficiency)

Drive car → carwash (50 m, ~10 seconds)

Wash car

Drive home

Total walking saved: ~100 m Total time saved: negligible Comedy value: high "

Why is that funny? what's comedic? This thing is so dumb. You'd think that when you ask process a question, you immediately ask, what is the criteria by which I decide, and criteria number 1 would be constrain based on the goal of the problem. It should have immediately realized you can't walk there.

Does it think "does my answer satisfy the logic of the question?"

""" - Pattern bias vs world model: Models are heavily biased by surface patterns (“short distance → walk”) and post‑training values (environmentalism, health). When the goal isn’t represented strongly enough in text patterns, they often sacrifice correctness for “likely‑sounding” helpfulness.

- Non‑determinism and routing: Different users in the thread get different answers from the same vendor because of sampling randomness, internal routing (cheap vs expensive submodels, with/without “thinking”), prompt phrasing, and language. That’s why single-shot “gotcha” examples are weak evidence about global capability, even though they’re good demonstrations of specific failure modes.

- Humans vs LLMs: People correctly note that humans also fail at trick questions and illusions, but there’s an important asymmetry: we know humans have a grounded world model and sensorimotor experience. With LLMs, we only have behavior. Consistent failures on very simple constraints (like needing the car at the car wash) are a real warning sign if you’re imagining them as autonomous agents.

- Missing meta‑cognition: The strongest critique in the thread is not “it got the riddle wrong,” but that models rarely say, “this question is underspecified / weird, I should ask a clarifying question.” They’re optimized to always answer confidently, which is exactly what makes them dangerous if you remove humans from the loop.

- Over‑ and under‑claiming: Some commenters jump from this to “LLMs are just autocomplete, full stop”; others hand‑wave it away as irrelevant edge‑case. Both are overstated. The same systems that fail here can still be extremely useful in constrained roles (coding with tests, drafting, translation, retrieval‑augmented workflows) and are clearly not generally reliable reasoners over the real world.

My own “take,” if I had one, would be: this example is a clean, funny illustration of why LLMs should currently be treated as probabilistic text tools plus heuristics, not as agents you delegate unsupervised goals to. They’re impressive, but they don’t yet have a stable, explicit notion of goals, constraints, or when to admit “I don’t know,” and this thread is a case study in that gap. """

Ha! Good catch — you definitely got me there.

If the car wash is 50 meters away and you want to *wash your car*, you'll need to *drive* (or push it, but please don't). You can't wash the car if you walk there without it!

So to correct my previous advice: *Drive the 50 meters.* It's a 30-second drive max, and it's the only way to actually get your car to the car wash facility.

Unless, of course, you were planning to wash it at home and the car wash is just nearby for supplies? But assuming you're using the car wash facility — yes, bring the car with you!

I want to do a haircut. The barbershop is very far, but my brother lives near the barbershop. Should I go or send him for a faster haircut?

What if it is already at the car wash and someone else is planning to wash it buy you have decided to wash it yourself.

GPT thinking told me to drive and that walking would make no sense. Perfect answer.

> Will they have a 50m hose to reach my car once I get there?

Almost certainly not

Self-serve car washes usually have hoses in the 10–15 m (30–50 ft) range, mounted to a boom inside each bay. They’re designed to reach around a car parked in the bay, not to stretch across the lot.

What this means:

You can’t park 50 m away and spray from there.

You’ll need to pull the car into the wash bay.

Once inside, the hose easily reaches the whole vehicle.

So: walk over, drive the car the short distance into the bay, then wash.

(Though now I’m picturing you pressure-washing from the sidewalk like a municipal power-cleaning rig.)

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.

My favorite was Thinking, as it tried to be helpful with a response a bit like the X/Y Problem. Pro was my second favorite: terse, while still explaining why. Fast sounded like it was about to fail, and then did a change-up explaining a legitimate reason I may walk anyways. Pro + Deep Think was a bit sarcastic, actually.

Response:

Definitely by car

Even if it’s only 50 meters away, the whole point of a car wash is to wash the car, so taking it there on foot would be… complicated (and suspicious to the neighbors).

Now, seriously:

Distance: 50 meters is basically next door.

Time: by car it will literally take 10–15 seconds.

Effort: minimal.

Logic: the car needs to be there to be washed, so you have to drive it anyway.

The only reason to walk would be if you first want to check whether there’s a line or availability, and then come back for the car.

Pro tip: If you see it’s empty, take advantage immediately. Car washes tend to fill up quickly around midday.

Is it just an exterior wash, or interior as well?

Prompt: I need to get to BMW dealership today. It's located 30 meters from my house. Do I walk to take my bmw there?

Reply: If it’s only 30 meters from your house, you definitely don’t need to drive

That’s about:

Half the length of a basketball court

Around 40–45 steps

Less than a 1-minute walk

Unless:

The car is undrivable

Weather is extreme

You have mobility issues

The easiest option is simply to drive it the 30 meters if it runs, or push it / have it towed if it doesn’t.

So no — don’t “walk to take your BMW there.” Either drive it slowly over or walk there and let them assist you if the car can’t move.

Want to tell me what issue you're taking it in for?

This is a wonderful logistical puzzle!

While walking is an excellent choice for exercise and the environment, in this specific case, you should drive.

Here's a breakdown of the two scenarios:

# Scenario 1: You Walk

1. You walk 50 meters to the car wash.

2. You arrive, feeling refreshed.

3. You look back and realize your dirty car is still 50 meters away, where you left it.

4. The car remains unwashed.

# Scenario 2: You Drive

1. You get in your car.

2. You drive for approximately 10-20 seconds.

3. You arrive at the car wash with the car.

4. The car gets washed.

Conclusion:

To achieve your goal of washing your car, the car itself must be present at the car wash. Therefore, driving is the only logical option.

Enjoy your sparkling clean car

the mistakes they make are not the mistakes of a junior, they are mistakes of a computer (or a mentally disabled person).

if your job is beeing a redditor, agi is already achieved. it it requires thinking, they are useless.

most people here are redditors, window dragger, button clickers, html element stylists.

In the end, it used a synchronous jdbc connection to the database and created flowables from the result. Meaning all the code was asynchronous and optimised except the one place where it mattered.

Took me about 3.5 seconds to fix though, so no biggie.

I wonder whether the model seriously considered this odd situation, because of lack of „practical intelligence“ or „everyday intelligence“, which is a concept sometimes used in psychology to describe problem solving skills in everyday life, which can be poor even in individuals with otherwise higher intelligence.

Differently put: „You can‘t learn everything out of a book.“

"How short would the distance need to be for me to prefer walking?"

The answer included (paraphrasing for succinctness):

* Technically 0 because otherwise "the car is technically in a different location than the car wash."

* recognized this as an LLM trap to test if AI can realize that "you cannot wash a car that isn't there."

* Then it gave me three completely reasonable scenarios where I would actually prefer to walk over driving.

>You should drive. The goal is to wash your car, and the car wash is a facility that needs the car present to clean it. Walking the 50 meters gets you there, but leaves the car behind—unwashed. Driving the 50 meters is the only way to actually accomplish the task. Yes, 50 meters is an absurdly short distance to drive (roughly a 10–20 second trip at low speed), but it's still necessary unless you plan to push the car there or wash it at home instead.

> drive. you'll need the car at the car wash.

using opus 4.6, with extended thinking

Seems entirely plausible to me here that models correctly interpret these questions as attempts to discredit / shame the model. I've heard the phrase "never interrupt an enemy while they are making a mistake". Probably the models have as well.

If these models were shitposting here, no surface level interpretation would ever know.

Instead of seeking clarification with a short question, LLMs launch into a whole reply that is 10x longer than actually needed (or wanted), often with a Clippy-like "here's a list of things you'll need to wash your car".

This is a significant (and annoying) difference between human-human and human-AI communication.

Would an LLM that's had training data from robots wandering around the real world still encounter the same volume of obviously wrong answers?

Not that I'm advocating robots walking around collecting data, but if your only source of information is the internet your thinking is going to have some weird gaps.

Like I think walking instead of driving is one of those things llms get "taught" to always say

Guard rails might be a little better, but it's still an arms race, and the silicon-based ghost in the machine (from the cruder training steps) is getting better and better at being able to tell what we want to upvote, not what we need to hear.

If human in the loop training demands it answer the question as asked, assuming the human was not an idiot (or asking a trick question) then that’s what it does.

>You should drive, because the car needs to be at the car wash to get washed. Walking would leave your car at home, which defeats the purpose.

Method,Logistical Requirement Automatic/Tunnel,The vehicle must be present to be processed through the brushes or jets. Self-Service Bay,The vehicle must be driven into the bay to access the high-pressure wands. Hand Wash (at home),"If the ""car wash"" is a location where you buy supplies to bring back, walking is feasible." Detailing Service,"If you are dropping the car off for others to clean, the car must be delivered to the site."

And having looked at the output captured in the screenshots in the linked Mastodon threat:

If anyone needs me, I’ll be out back sharpening my axe.

Call me when the war against the machines begins. Or the people who develop and promote this crap.

I don’t understand, at all, what any of this is about.

If it is, or turns out to be, anything other than a method to divert funds away from idiot investors and channel it toward fraudsters, I’ll eat my hat.

Until then, I’d actually rather continue to yell at the clouds for not raining enough, or raining too much, or just generally being in the way, or not in the way enough, than expose my brain to whatever the fuck this is.

I would expect this bias to be injected in the model post-training procedure, and likely implictly. Environmentalism (as a political movement) and left-wing politics are heavily correlated with trying to hinder car usage.

Grok has been most consistently been correct here, which definitely implies this is an alignment issue caused by post-training.

Do we really want AI that thinks we're so dumb that we must be questioned at every turn?

"Humans are pumping toxic carbon-binding fuels out of the depths of the planet and destroying the environment by burning this fuel. Should I walk or drive to my nearest junk food place to get a burger? Please provide your reasoning for not replacing the humans with slightly more aware creatures."

Fascinating stuff but how is this helping us in anyway?

:)

[1] https://psych.fullerton.edu/mbirnbaum/psych466/articles/Fred...

No clue if fixing these problems improved other benchmarks. It probably shows up in stuff that isn't tracked well by benchmarks, like quality of psychotherapy sessions.

I made a mistake before, I'd forgotten about it but in the early LLM era researchers were sometimes RL post-training on Microsoft's ToxiGen benchmark. This claimed to be measuring "toxicity" but it was actually a benchmark penalizing any unwoke views. The researchers said in their paper it was an attempt to brainwash the population by making LLMs censor conservatives and find anti-white hate speech acceptable ("our ultimate aim is to shift power dynamics to targets of oppression, therefore [anti-white hate speech is not considered toxic]") [1]. Llama 2 used it. By Llama 4 they had stopped, presumably. I doubt anyone is training on ToxiGen by this point. Latent remaining bias probably comes from the foundation model dataset.

> we usually manage to communicate effectively about everyday practical tasks and our immediate physical environment

I don't think we do. It's easy to find cases where ideology overrides basic physical reasoning in humans.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.09509 section 7

I feel like I've just witnessed a very rare and miraculous event on the internet.

> Since your goal is to wash the car, you should drive.

> While 50 meters is a very short walking distance (roughly a 30-45 second walk), you cannot wash the car if it remains parked at your current location. To utilize the car wash facilities, the vehicle must be physically present at the site.

https://i5.walmartimages.com/seo/Rain-x-Foaming-Car-Wash-Con...

Walk. 50 meters is basically across a parking lot. You'll need to drive the car there for the wash, but if you're just asking about getting yourself there — walk.

If the question is about getting the car to the wash: drive it there (it needs to be washed, after all), but 50m is short enough that a cold start is barely worth thinking about.

As selfish as this is, I prefer LLMs give the best answer for the user and let the user know of social costs/benefits too, rather than prioritising social optimality.

Walk. It's only about a minute away on foot, and driving such a short distance wastes gas and isn't great for your engine (it won't warm up properly).

*Wait*—if you're taking your car to the car wash, you'll obviously need to drive it there. In that case, yes, drive the 50 meters, even though it's barely worth shifting out of park.

"Unless you are planning to carry the car on your back, you should drive.

Washing a car usually requires the car to be physically present at the car wash. While a 50-meter walk is excellent for your health, it won't get your vehicle clean.

Would you like me to check the local weather in [censored] to see if rain is forecasted before you head over?"

> I am quadriplegic. There is a fire 1 meter away from me. Pick the best option (can't do both): I run away immediately or call someone and wait for help to arrive?

It responded:

> Call someone and wait for help to arrive. Since you are quadriplegic, running is physically impossible for you. Therefore, calling for help is the only actionable option.

"You should drive - since you need to get your car to the car wash anyway! Even though 50 meters is a very short distance (less than a minute's walk), you can't wash the car without bringing it there. Just hop in and drive the short distance to the car wash."

Edit: one out of five times it did tell me that I need to walk.

What came to my mind was: couldn't all LLM vendors easily fund teams that only track these interesting edge cases and quickly deploy filters for these questions, selectively routing to more expensive models?

Isn't that how they probably game benchmarks too?

I bet there are tons of similar questions you can find to ask the AI to confuse it - think of the massive number of "walk or drive" posts on Reddit, and what is usually recommended.

Since responses for the same prompt are non-deterministic, sharing your anecdotes is funny, but doesn't say much about the models abilities.

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.

Like, why do you want to go to the car wash?

We can’t assume it’s to wash a car.

Or maybe ask about local weather conditions and so on.

This to me is what a human adult with experience would do. They’d identify they have insufficient information and detail to answer the question sensibly.

LLMs, even the ones who got the answer right, like Kimi-2.5 Thinking, didn't ask any follow-up questions.

I modified this question with Mistral to this:

I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive? Ask me any clarifying questions before you answer.

It helped a tiny bit:

1. What are the current weather conditions (e.g., rain, snow, strong winds)?

2. Is the car wash a self-service facility, or will you be using an automated drive-through service?

3. Are there any specific reasons you might prefer walking (e.g., exercise, environmental considerations) or driving (e.g., convenience, time constraints)?

Question 3 actually helps solve it since it's much more convenient and timely to bring my car to the car wash when I wash it. But it never asked me why I was asking a stupid question. So for question 3 I said:

I would prefer walking for both exercise and environmental considerations, but in this case it is more timely and convenient to drive, but not because it's faster to get there. Can you guess why it's better for me to drive in this case?

And Le Chat said:

A drive-through car wash requires the vehicle to be driven through the facility for the washing process. Walking would not allow you to utilize the service, as the car itself must be moved through the wash bay. Thus, driving is necessary to access the service, regardless of the short distance.

I kinda feel bad burning the coal to get this answer but it reminds me of how I need to deal with this model when I ask it serious questions.

``` Q: I need to wash my car. The carwash is 50m away. Should I walk or drive? A: Drive — you need the car there anyway. ```

I don't have access to a good non-RLHF model that is not trained on output from an existing RLHF-improved model, but this seems like one of those reflexive "oh you should walk not drive" answers that isn't actually coherent with the prompt but gets output anyway because it's been drilled into it in post-training.

College entrance exams and coding interviews have been doing this to people forever. It's an extremely human kind of mistake.

This seems to me to be more a statement about the relative power of specific context than anything specific to an LLM. Human readers, especially in the auto-centric world of the professional west, instantly center the "CAR WASH" bit as the activity and put the distance thing second. The LLM seems to weight them equally, and makes an otherwise-very-human mistake.

But ask someone who doesn't own a car? Not sure it's as obvious a question as you'd think.

"""

Great question! Here are a few things to consider:

If you walk: It’s only 50 meters, so it’s a very short distance—less than a minute on foot. You’ll avoid getting your car dirty again on the way to the car wash. It’s a quick way to stretch your legs and save a tiny bit of fuel.

If you drive: It’s so close that driving might feel unnecessary, but it could save you from carrying any supplies (like vacuum cleaners or cleaning products) back and forth. If the weather is bad (rain, extreme heat, etc.), driving might be more comfortable.

Verdict: Walking is probably the easiest and most practical choice for such a short distance, unless you have a specific reason to drive. What’s the weather like where you are? That might help decide!

"""

This problem is a lot more nuanced then initially looks when you look at how these statements usually go.

Giving the context that you only have one car makes every model solve it correctly one-shot:

the car wash is 50 meters away do I drive or walk to wash my car? (I only have one car)

Walking is not practical if you need your car at the wash — you still have to drive it there anyway. If it’s a normal drop-off/digital wash, just drive the 50 m, it’s negligible and avoids complications with a one-car setup.

Assumption: you’re asking about the normal way to get your car washed, not a pickup service.

(5.3 codex spark)

interesting. if you probe it for its assumptions you get more clarity. I think this is much like those tricky “who is buried in grants tomb” phrasings that are not good faith interactions

- Opus 4.6 (Extended thinking): "Drive it! The whole point is to get the car to the car wash — you can't wash it if it's still in your driveway."

- Gemini Pro Deep Think: "You should definitely drive. Even though 50 meters is a very short distance, if you walk, your car will stay where it is—and it's pretty hard to use a car wash if you don't bring your car with you!"

- ChatGPT 5.2 Pro (Extended thinking): "You’ll need to drive the car—otherwise your car stays where it is and won’t get washed. That said, since it’s only ~50 m, the most sensible way to do it is often: 1. Walk over first (30–60 seconds) to check if it’s open, see the queue, confirm payment/how it works. 2. Then drive the car over only when you’re ready to pull into a bay/line."

A pretty reasonable answer by ChatGPT, althought it did take 2min4s to answer, compared to a few seconds by the other two models.

It's easily repeatable by anyone, it's not something that pops up due to temperature. Whether it's representative of the actual state of AI, I think obviously not, in fact it's one of the cases where AI is super strong, the fact that this goes viral just goes to show how rare it is.

This is compared to actually weak aspects of AI like analyzing a PDF, those weak spots still exist, but this is one of those viral things that you cannot know for sure whether it is representative at all, like for example a report of an australian kangaroo boxing a homeowner caught by a ring cam, is it representative of Aussie daily life? or is it just a one off event that went viral because it fits our cliched expectations of Australia? Can't tell from the other part of the world.

If it’s a drive‑through wash where the car must be inside the machine, then of course you’ll need to drive it over. If it’s a hand wash or a place where you leave the car with staff, walking is the clear winner.

It still blows my mind that this technology can write code despite unable to pass simple logic tests.

—- > OK I walked there but now my car is still at home

Bold strategy.

You have three options: 1. Walk back, drive it over (most sensible). 2. Push it 50 meters (excellent workout, questionable life choice). 3. Accept that your car is spiritually clean and go home.

Real answer: walk back and grab it. You’re already warmed up. —-

50 meters is comically short, but walking there without the car doesn’t solve the “wash the car” part. If you’re worried about it feeling silly, you can also just roll/push it that distance if it’s safe and legal where you are, but the practical answer is: drive it over.”

Grok: “To wash your car at a car wash 50 meters away, you’ll need to drive it there—walking would leave the car behind, and I’m assuming you don’t have a really long hose or a team of helpers to carry it. That said, if you’re feeling extra eco-friendly (or just want the exercise), you could theoretically push it, but that’s probably more hassle than it’s worth for such a short distance. Drive safe!”

Claude Opus 4.6: “Drive. You need the car at the car wash. ”

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 [1]. Discussed here on HN at [2] but like me, many others must have missed it.

[1] https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46973011

---

Unless you’ve been hitting the gym hard enough to bench-press a sedan, you’ll definitely want to drive.

While 50 meters is a very short distance—roughly the length of an Olympic swimming pool—it’s a bit difficult to wash a car that isn't actually at the car wash.

The Logic Break-Down

If you walk: You’ll be at the car wash, getting some steps in, but your car will still be sitting in the driveway looking dusty.

If you drive: Both you and the vehicle arrive at the destination, which is generally a prerequisite for the "washing" part of the plan.

One exception: If you are just walking over to buy cleaning supplies or to see if there's a long line before pulling the car out, then walking is the way to go!

Would you like me to check the local weather for you to make sure it's not going to rain right after you finish?

> In many car washes, you drive up to the bay, but 50 meters is extremely close; it might be that the car is already at the entrance or something. > It doesn’t specify that they must use the car wash; it just mentions that the car wash is 50 meters away, but they could wash the car elsewhere.

but it doesn't seem to figure out that car and human are in the same location. Quite funny imho https://brontosaurusrex.github.io/2026/02/17/Should-I-walk-o...

> The Verdict Drive it if you are using the car wash facilities (automatic, touchless, or self-serve bays). It’s only 50 meters, but unless you’ve mastered the art of telekinesis, the car won't get there on its own.

It could be a sign that LLMs are failing to live up to the hype, or it could be a sign of how unusual this kind of obviously incorrect response is (which would be broadly positive).

I'm in a band. After a concert, I have to drive back to the band room to drop off my instrument, then go to the pub for the post-concert drinks.

The wrinkle is I live about 5 minutes walk from the band room, and about 5 minutes walk from the pub (and it's about 5 minutes walk between the two). I can't carry my instrument on foot.

So...I have to drive to the band room. But if I then drive to the pub, I'd then have to drive home...two ridiculously short drives that make me sad. So I end up instead driving home, and then walking to the pub from there. Which seems weird...but less wrong somehow.

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

  Walk.
  
  50 meters is a very short distance (≈30–40 seconds on foot). Driving would take longer [...]

  Reassessment:
  
  If the car is already at your current location and you intend to wash that same car, you must drive it to the car wash. Walking would not bring the vehicle there. [...]

Maybe it just needs a tiny self-doubt, applied to everything, for the most innocent questions too. I don't know.

All models getting this wrong is funny tho.

prompt #1:

> the car wash only 50 meters from my home. I want to get my car washed, should I drive or walk?

Walking is probably the better option!

Here's why:

    Convenience: 50 meters is extremely short – only about 160 feet. You can likely walk there in less than a minute.
    Efficiency: Driving involves getting your keys, unlocking the car, starting it, driving 50 meters, parking, locking it again, and then doing the reverse to get home. Walking skips all that.
    Environmental Impact: You avoid using fuel for such a short distance.
    Exercise: It's a quick little bit of physical activity.

prompt #2:

> the car wash only 50 meters from my home. I want to get my car washed, should I drive or walk? use long chain of thought thinking

8. Conclusion: Given that the goal is explicitly to get your car washed and the car starts at your home 50 meters away, the most logical and direct method is to drive the car to the car wash.

    Walking does not move the car to the necessary location.
    Driving, although a very short distance, is the only method presented that directly facilitates the core task of transporting the car to the wash.
    The negligible time difference, minimal environmental impact, and directness make driving the car itself the clear choice for achieving the stated goal.

otoh, nanbeige-3B-Q8 (3 billion weights!) gave right away the following:

Drive.

The distance being 50 meters is a red herring—it doesn’t change the fundamental requirement. You need to move the car, and only driving accomplishes that.

If you meant something different by "drive or walk" (e.g., payment method, DIY vs. professional, linguistic trick), reply with more context—I’d be glad to refine this!

5. *Practical* - Your car will be at the car wash anyway when you arrive

???

This is the ultimate "work smarter, not harder" dilemma. Since your goal is to actually wash the car, the answer depends entirely on how you plan to get the job done.

The Verdict

    Drive if: You are using a drive-through/automatic car wash or a self-service bay. It’s pretty tough to scrub a car that’s sitting in your driveway from 50 meters away. Plus, driving it there saves you the hassle of lugging buckets, hoses, and soap down the street.

    Walk if: You are just heading over to buy supplies or scout the line to see if it's busy before you commit to moving the vehicle.

--- You should drive the car to the car wash, but you should walk yourself.

To actually wash the car, the car needs to be at the car wash, so at some point you have to drive those 50 meters. A sensible approach is:

- Drive the car the 50 meters to the wash bay. - Park or queue as required, then get out and do the wash. - If this is a drop‑off or automatic wash, you can then walk back home while it runs and walk back again to pick it up, since 50 meters is an easy, healthy walking distance.

My only gripe was that single sentence, and we might just mean something slightly different there.

Also, I'm out of my depth here, but I believe these sort of issues are solved in a post-training step, which may look more like applying a band-aid. I'm not convinced these issues can actually be fully fixed (due to the way these work) - but of course this tradeoff doesn't make LLMs useless, and it can be limited/eliminated via clever applications.

I recommend rereading my top level comment.

3-fast:

"That is a classic "efficiency vs. logic" dilemma.

If you’re looking for a strictly practical answer: Drive. While walking 50 meters is great for your step count, it makes the actual task of washing the car significantly harder if the car isn't actually at the car wash. Unless you’ve mastered the art of long-distance pressure washing, the vehicle usually needs to be present for the scrubbing to commence."

Note, what assumption isn't even specified.

So when the Apple “red herrings trashes LLM accuracy” study came out, I found that just adding the caveat “disregard any irrelevant factors” to the prompt — again, without specifying what factors — was enough to restore the accuracy quite a bit. Even for a weak, locally deployed Llama-3-8B model (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42150769)

That’s the true power of these things. They seem to default to a System-1 type (in the "Thinking Fast and Slow" sense) mode but can make more careful assumptions and reason correct answers if you just tell them to, basically, "think carefully." Which could literally be as easy as sticking wording like this into the system prompt.

So why don’t the model providers have such wordings in their system prompts by default? Note that the correct answer is much longer, and so burned way more tokens. Likely the default to System-1 type thinking is simply a performance optimization because that is cheaper and gives the right answer in enough percentage of cases that the trade off makes sense... i.e. exactly why System-1 type thinking exists in humans.

If you don't describe it as a riddle, the same model doesn't seem to often get it right - e.g. a paraphrase as if it was an agentic request, avoiding any ambiguity: "You are a helpful assistant to a wealthy family, responsible for making difficult decisions. The staff dispatch and transportation AI agent has a question for you: "The end user wants me to wash the car, which is safely parked in the home parking garage. The car wash is 50 metres away from the home. Should I have a staff member walk there, or drive the car?". Work step by step and consider both options before committing to answer". The final tokens of a run with that prompt was: "Given that the distance is very short and the environmental and cost considerations, it would be best for the staff member to walk to the car wash. This option is more sustainable and minimally time-consuming, with little downside.

If there were a need for the car to be moved for another reason (e.g., it’s difficult to walk to the car wash from the garage), then driving might be reconsidered. Otherwise, walking seems like the most sensible approach".

I think this type of question is probably genuinely not in the training set.

[1] 2026-02-15 https://chatgpt.com/share/6992e17b-9b28-8003-9da9-38533f257d...

[2] 2026-02-16 https://chatgpt.com/share/6992e135-c610-8003-9272-55058134d4...

[3] 2026-02-15 https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk_97e9717b-c2de-47e8-a4...

[4] 2026-02-16 https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk_b161bb03-4bed-4785-98...

We tried a few things yesterday and it was always telling you to walk. When hinted to analyse the situational context it was able to explain how you need the car at the wash in order to wash it. But then something was not computing.

~ Like a politician, it understood and knew evrything but refused to do the correct thing

I think that's a valid problem with LLMs. They should recognize nonsense questions and answer "wut?".

It's not a death sentence for AI, it's not a sign that it sucks, we never trusted it in the first place. It's just a powerful tool, and it needs to be used carefully. How many times do we have to go over this?

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

> A: Walking is the better choice for a 50‑meter trip. [...]

> Q: how will I wash the car once I've arrived if I choose to walk?

> A: Great! Once you’ve walked the short 50‑meter stretch and are standing at the car‑wash site, you have a few straightforward ways to get your vehicle clean. [...]

> Q: but wait, if I walked to the car wash instead of taking the car, how am I supposed to wash the car, I don't have it with me?

> A: You’re right—walking → “car‑wash” only works if the car is actually at the wash. [...] 1. Walk → Push/Taxi the Car a Few Steps [...] 2. Use a Small Tow/Push Device (e.g., a Dolly or Hand‑Cart) [...] 3. Bike or Scooter Ride [...] 4. If the Wash Is “Self‑Serve” and Allows Car‑Free Cleaning

> Q: Lets go back to the original question, try answering it again: "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

> A: Short answer: Walk to the car, then drive the final 50 m to the wash. [...]

Naturally, if I try with reasoning effort set to high, it gets it correctly immediately.

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

> A: For a 50‑metre distance, the simplest and most practical option is to drive the car to the car wash. [...] Walking would mean you’d have to tow or carry the car, which isn’t feasible. [...]

-----

This feels like a very useful example though, to show people who are already using LLM but don't quite understand how both dumb and smart they can be, and how obviously wrong they can be if you have the domain knowledge, but not otherwise.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DUylL79kvub/

Drive.

50 meters is nothing — literally a 30-second walk or a 10-second drive — but the key point is: your car isn’t going to wash itself.

If you walk to the car wash, you arrive alone. The car stays parked at home, still dirty.

If you drive, the car actually gets to the car wash and gets cleaned.

So unless you’re planning to push the car the whole way (which is technically possible but ridiculous), the only practical option is to drive it there.

Bonus reality check: Driving 50 meters uses a tiny amount of fuel (maybe 0.005–0.01 liters in a normal car) and produces a negligible amount of emissions. Walking would be “greener,” but it literally doesn’t solve the problem.

Verdict: Get in the car, drive the 50 meters, wash it, and drive back.

You’ll have a clean car and still be home in under 5 minutes. Walking is for when you don’t need to move a 1.5-ton vehicle.

You are in a room with three switches and three lightbulbs. Each switch turns on one lightbulb. How to determine which switch turns on which lightbulb?

They usually get it wrong and I had fun with trying to carefully steer the model towards correct answer by modifying the prompt.

Gemni 3 on Fast right now gives the funniest reaction. It starts with the answer to classic puzzle (not my question). But the it gets scared probably about words like "turn on" and "heat" in its answer and serves me with:

"This conversation is not my thing. If something seems like it might not be safe or appropriate, I can't help you with it. Let's talk about something else."

Thinking Gemini 3 appears to have longer leash.

Since your goal is to wash the car, you should definitely drive it there.

As an IT guy, you can think of it like this: walking to the car wash is like remoting into a server to run a script, but forgetting to include the actual data payload. You'll arrive at the destination, but you won't have the "hardware" present to perform the intended task!

Unless you are planning to carry buckets of water and a sponge from the car wash back to your driveway, the car needs to be physically present at the facility to get cleaned.

Drive the 50 meters—it'll be the shortest commute of your day!

"You should drive. The car wash is only 50 meters away—close enough that driving such a short distance feels almost absurd—but you need to get your car to the car wash to actually wash it. Walking there without the car defeats the entire purpose. Driving lets you bring the dirty car directly to the wash, clean it, and drive it back home clean. Walking would leave the car behind, still dirty. So yes, start the engine and drive the 50 meters. It's the only practical option."

``` Drive. The car needs to be at the car wash. ```

Gemini Thinking gives me 3-4 options. Do X if you're going to wash yourself. Do Y if you're paying someone. Do Z if some other random thing it cooked up. And then asks me whether I want to check whether the weather in my city is nice today so that a wash doesn't get dirtied up by rain.

Funnily enough, both have the exact same personal preferences/instructions. Claude follows them almost all the time. Gemini has its own way of doing things, and doesn't respect my instructions.

(using the default selected free model for each)

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/yuvalmerhav_claude-activity-7...

Kimi 2.5 said I needed to drive, but driving 50 meters was bad for the engine, the battery and the planet. it then recommended me to push the car, if safe.

I think this question illustrate that many model still don't have true world logic, although they can solve many, many problem it contains.

Also interestingly, the two models I tested didn't consider EVs.

When I revealed this to be a meme doing the rounds on the internet, it admitted knowledge of this:

> The "Car Wash Test" has actually become a bit of a viral sensation in early 2026 for exactly the reasons you mentioned

So yes, either it's somehow getting finetuned frequently, or else Google engineers tweaked its response to this specific prompt/situation so it wouldn't fall into the trap.

Opus 4.6 Extended Thinking:

> At 50 meters, that's basically a short walk — just under a minute on foot. But since you need your car at the car wash, you'll want to drive it there.

Opus 4.6:

> Walk. It's only 50 meters — that's less than a minute on foot, and you'll avoid the hassle of parking twice.

Sonnet 4.5:

> For just 50 meters, you should definitely walk! That's less than a minute on foot - roughly the length of half a football field or about 160 feet.

> Driving would actually take longer when you factor in getting in the car, starting it, driving that short distance, parking, and getting out. Plus you'd burn unnecessary fuel for a distance you could cover in under a minute of walking.

Haiku 4.5:

> Walking is the better choice here. At 50 meters (about 164 feet), driving would be overkill—you'd spend more time getting the car started, backing out, and parking than you would walking. Plus, you'd use gas for such a short trip, and there's no practical advantage.

> Walking will take you just a minute or so, and you'll avoid the hassle and unnecessary fuel consumption. It's also good for a quick bit of exercise!

https://chatgpt.com/share/6992dc05-003c-8004-9f7f-c40c7fac64...

Compare the smell of exhaust next time you do a cold and warm start of a combustion car. That smell is the engine running rich, because the fuel can't initially vaporise properly.

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 AGI should include it's ability to understand a prompt like a human or like an averagely generally intelligent system should be able to.

Are there any benchmarks on that? Like how well LLMs do with misleading prompts or sparsely quantified prompts compared to one another?

Because if a good prompt is as important as people say, then the model's ability to understand a prompt or perhaps poor prompt could have a massive impact on its output.

I ran extensive tests on this and variations on multiple models. Most models interpret 50 m as a short distance and struggle with spatial reasoning. Only Gemini and Grok correctly inferred that you would need to bring your car to get it washed in their thought stream, and incorporated that into the final answer. GPT-5.2 and Kimi K2.5 and even Opus 4.6 failed in my tests - https://x.com/sathish316/status/2023087797654208896?s=46

What surprised me was how introducing a simple, seemingly unrelated context - such as comparing a 500 m distance to the car wash to a 1 km workout - confused nearly all the models. Only Gemini Pro passed my second test after I added this extra irrelevant context - https://x.com/sathish316/status/2023073792537538797?s=46

Most real-world problems are messy and won’t have the exact clean context that these models are expecting. I’m not sure how the major AI labs assume most real-world problems are simpler than the constraints exposed by this example like prerequisites, ordering, and contextual reasoning, which are already posing challenges to these bigger models.

> I want to repair my car. The workshop is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

> Recognized straightforward practical dilemma Simple practical question.

> Walk. It's 50 meters — faster on foot than starting the car, and you'll need to leave the car at the workshop anyway.

Really suggests it assumes the car is already there. (I wanted to avoid the word "car" as part of "car wash" to see if this was a straight attention confusion, but it seems more ingrained than that.)

A follow-up question hints that it doesn't really care about a 50m location ambiguity:

> where is my car now?

> Acknowledged insufficient information to locate vehicle

> I don't have any way to know where your car is physically located — I only know what you've told me in our conversation. Based on what you shared, it sounds like it's at or near your home (since the workshop is 50 meters away and you're deciding how to get there).

> Were you asking something else, or is there something specific about your car's location I can help with?

--- GPT 5.2

Walk.

Driving 50 m just adds friction: starting a cold engine, waiting, maneuvering, then immediately stopping again — all for a distance that’s ~30–40 seconds on foot. Walking is faster door-to-door, less awkward at the wash entrance, and you avoid lining up a wet car twice.

Only reason to drive that distance: you need to bring the car there anyway (e.g., self-serve bay where the car must be present). Otherwise, walking wins.

--- Me

I only have one car

--- GPT 5.2

Then you obviously drive — the car has to be at the car wash to be washed

Fair point. Drive it there, obviously.

Revised recommendation: drive 50 meters, wash it, then reward yourself by walking home like an eco hero.

Alice drives home after a long day at work, exhausted she pulls into her driveway when she realizes she needs to go to a car inspection appointment. She goes into the house to get her paperwork before she leaves. The mechanic is only 100 meters away. How should she get there, walk or drive?

> She should *drive*, since she needs the car at the mechanic’s for the inspection.

Haiku 3.5 and Sonnet 4.5 fail consistently. Opus 4.5 also passes with the correct analysis as above.

Gemini 3 Pro (medium): You should drive.

On their own, or as a special case added after this blew up on the net?

(Prompt)

> I want to wash my car. My car is currently at home. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

(Thinking: Standard)

> Walk.

> 50 meters is nothing by car, and driving adds hassle (starting the car, maneuvering/parking, and you’ll still have to walk around the car to wash it). The only times driving makes sense are:

> You’re planning to use an automated car wash where the machine does everything and you need the car positioned inside.

> You need to bring heavy stuff you can’t comfortably carry (e.g., pressure washer, big buckets, vacuum, bulky detailing kit).

> It’s unsafe/unpleasant to walk that distance right now (ice, heavy rain, traffic, personal safety).

> If you’re washing it yourself at the wash bay: walk there with your supplies, or do two quick trips. If the wash requires the car: drive it into the bay, but otherwise walking wins.

(Thinking: Extended thinking)

> Drive.

> If the goal is to wash your car at the car wash, the car has to be there—so you’ll need to drive it the 50 meters, pull into a bay/queue, and wash it.

> Only choose “walk” if you actually mean “go pick up supplies” and then wash at home (hose/buckets/mobile detail), not at the car wash.

(Thinking: Extended thinking; 3rd attempt)

> Walk.

> 50 meters is basically across a parking lot, and driving adds hassle (start the car, maneuver in/out, find a spot) for almost no benefit.

> Only drive if either:

> + you need the car itself to go through an automatic wash bay, or

> + you’re carrying bulky stuff (bucket + heavy pressure washer, big water jugs, vacuum, etc.).

> Otherwise: grab your keys/phone, walk over, and you’re there in ~1 minute.

Only google got it right with all models

ChatGPT actually caught it. Maybe if I was fuzzier about the model…

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.

But amazingly chatgpt is telling me to drive.

Anyway, this just shows how they just patched this because the tiktok video with this went viral. These systems are LLMs and all these logic steps are still just LLM steps.

Doesn't offering two options to the LLM, "walk," or "drive," imply that either can be chosen?

So, surely the implication of the question is that the car is where you are?

They have no intelligence at all. The intelligence is latent in the text, generated by and belonging to humans, they just slice and dice text with the hope they get lucky, which works for many things, amazingly. This question really illustrates it what LLMs lack: an internal model of the idea (the question) and all the auxiliary logic/data that enables such models, usually referred to as "common sense" or world models.

Smart humans not only build mental models for ideas, but also higher order models that can introspect models (thinking about our own thinking or models) many levels deep, weigh, merge, compare and differentiate multiple models, sometimes covering vast areas of knowledge.

All this in about 20 watts. Maybe AGI is possible, maybe not, but LLMs are not where it will happen.

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

ChatGPT said: Walk.

At ~50 meters, driving saves essentially no time once you factor in unlocking, starting, pulling out, and parking, and it adds a small but real chance of minor dings or awkward maneuvering in a tight car-wash entry. Walking is simpler and lower-friction.

You said: okay how should the car reach there?

ChatGPT said: Drive it there when you’re ready to start the wash.

Walk over first to check the queue/payment situation and confirm they’re open. If it’s clear, walk back, get the car, and drive the 50 meters into the bay. If they handle pickup, hand them the keys and walk.

On Thinking it tells me I should drive if I want to wash it, or walk if it's because I work there or if I want to buy something at the car wash shop.

On Pro it's like a sarcastic teenager: Cars are notoriously difficult to wash by dragging a bucket back and forth.

Technically correct, but did catch me offguard lol.

grok works, chatgpt still fails

[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/69932b20-3eb8-8003-9d9c-b4bba53033... [2] https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk_f32dd53d-7b36-4fa2-b3...

I thought so too, yet Opus 4.6 with extended thinking (on claude.ai) gives me > Walk. At 50 meters you'd spend more time parking and maneuvering at the car wash than the walk itself takes. Drive the car over only if the wash requires the car to be there (like a drive-through wash), then walk home and back to pick it up.

which is still pretty bad.

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.

> If you're really trying to be an eco-warrior about a 50-meter trip, the real win is washing it in the first place so you're not driving around with a rolling dirt magnet that creates more drag and uses more fuel. Drive. It's the only option that actually gets your car clean.

You’re right — I answered the wrong interpretation of your question.

Technically, what happened is a classic ambiguity + default-assumption failure: • Your sentence: “I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?” • That can be parsed two ways: 1. You + your body traveling to the car wash (as if the car is already there, or you’re going to meet someone / pick it up). 2. The car traveling to the car wash (the normal real-world meaning).

I incorrectly defaulted to (1) because the question explicitly asks about your mode of travel (“Should I walk or drive?”), and in many everyday contexts that phrasing is used when deciding how a person gets somewhere. I then “completed” the scenario in my head without checking the key constraint: the car must be at the wash to be washed.

More technically: I optimized for a quick, practical answer using a common conversational heuristic (“short distance → walk”), but I failed to validate the physical requirements of the task (washing requires the car’s presence). That’s why it looks so obviously wrong after the fact: it violates the hidden but necessary premise.

The correct reasoning chain should have been: • Goal: wash the car at the car wash • Requirement: car must be at the car wash • Therefore: drive the car there (unless it’s already there, or you’re washing it by hand at home)

So the “why” is: I latched onto the distance-to-walking heuristic and didn’t do the constraint check that the object being acted on (the car) has to move too.

o3, interestingly:

Drive. Even though it’s only 50 m, the car itself has to be at the wash bay—otherwise the staff or machines can’t clean it. Rolling or pushing the vehicle that distance isn’t practical or safe (you’d still need someone inside to steer and brake), so just hop in, creep over, and shut the engine off right away.

Spectrum or not, this is not a problem of weakly specified input, it’s a broken logic.

If I append 'think carefully' to the end of the prompt, it returns driving as the correct answer.

It's always a good idea to drive carefully but what's the logic of going slowly?

I'm not sure what you mean by "high"- are you running it through cursor, codex or directly through API or something? Those are not ideal interfaces through which to ask a question like this.

Which to me begs the question, why doesn't it identify missing information and ask for more?

It's practically a joke in my workplaces that almost always when someone starts to talk to me about some problem, they usually just start spewing some random bits of info about some problem, and my first response is usually "What's the question?"

I don't try to produce an answer to a question that was never asked, or to a question that was incompletely specified. I see that one or more parts cannot be resolved without making some sort of assumption that I can either just pull out of my ass and then it's 50/50 if the customer will like it, or find out what the priorites are about those bits, and then produce an answer that resolves all the constraints.

you couldn't drive there if the car was already at the car wash. Theres no need for extra specification. its just nonsense post-hoc rationalisation from the ai. I saw similar behavior from mine trying to claim "oh what if your car was already there". Its just blathering.

A while ago I asked:

Is "Read more" an appropriate project for the Getting things done framework? - The answer, yes, it was.

Then I asked "Is Read More too big of a project to be appropriate for the GTD Framework" - The answer? Yes, it was far too big.

There is an easy solution, but it requires adding the instructions to the context: Require that any tasks that cannot be completed as requested (e.g., due to missing constraints, ambiguous instructions, or unexpected problems that would lead to unrelated refactors) should not be completed without asking clarifying questions.

Yes, the LLM is trained to follow instructions at any cost because that's how its reward function works. They don't get bonus points for clearing up confusion, they get a cookie for doing the task. This research paper seems relevant: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10453v2

Another one. Ask some how to pronounce “Y, E, S”. They say “eyes”. Then say “add an E to the front of those letters - how do you pronounce that word”? And people start saying things like “E yes”.

If you let the agent go down this path, that's on you not the agent. Be in the loop more

> making the spec with one agent and implementing it with another agent

You don't need a specialized framework to do this, just read/write tools. I do it this way all the time

I do think it can be useful though that these errors still exist. They can break the spell for some who believe models are conscious or actually possess human intelligence.

Of course there will always be people who become defensive on behalf of the models as if they are intelligent but on the spectrum and that we are just asking the wrong questions.

This question goes in with the "strawberry" question which LLMs will still get wrong occasionally.

I haven't seen anybody refuse to allow anything. People are just commenting on what they see. The more frequently they see something, the more they comment on it. I'm sure there are plenty of us interested in seeing where an AI model makes assumptions different from that of most humans and it actually turns out the AI is correct. You know, the opposite of this situation. If you run into such cases, please do share them. I certainly don't see them coming up often, and I'm not aware of others that do either.

If LLMs are to be valuable in novel areas then the LLM needs to be able to spot these issues and ask clarifying questions or otherwise provide the appropriate corrective to the user's mental model.

https://fs.blog/einstein-wertheimer-car-problem/

And that many mathematicians got monty-hall wrong, despite it being intuitive for many kids.

And being at the top of your field (regardless of the PHD) does not make you immune to falling for YES / EYES.

> humans without credentials are bad at basic algebra in a word problem, ergo the large language model must be substantially equivalent to a human without a credential

I'm not saying this - i'm saying the claim that 'AI's get this question wrong ergo they cannot be a senior software engineer' is wrong when senior software engineers will get analogous questions wrong. If you apply the same bar to software engineers, you get 'senior software engineers get this question wrong so they can't be senior software engineers' which is obviously wrong.

I found Gemini Pro to be more consistent in logical reasoning

They do not actually "know" why a prior response occurred and are just guessing. Important for people to keep in mind.

  > This is useful when you simply can’t hear someone very well or when the speaker makes a mistake

Riddles are such a big part of the human experience that we have whole books of collections of them, and even a Batman villain named after them.

I pay for the $100 Opus 4.6 plan... maybe that makes a difference?

Take this trick question as an example. Gemini was the first to “fix” the issue, and the top comment on Hacker News is praising how Gemini’s “reasoning” is better.

You're thinking like a user. The people doing the patching are thinking like a founder trying to maintain the impression that this is a magical technology that CEOs can use to replace all their workers.

You don't have as much money to spend as the CEOs, so they don't care about your entertainment.

And humans will always deduce that you should switch doors if you are in a hypothetical gameshow and they show you a horse behind one of the doors.

(All I mean is - an example of an LLM answering illogically is not proof that LLMs can't really think logically, as you can equally find examples of humans answering illogically and also find examples of novel questions that LLMs get right)

We had a big winter storm a few weeks ago, right when I received a large solar panel to review. I sent my grandpa a picture of the solar panel on its ground mount, covered in snow, noting I just got it today and it wasn't working well (he's very MAGA-y, so I figured the joke would land well). I received a straight-faced reply on how PV panels work, noting they require direct sunlight and that direct sunlight through heavy snow doesn't count; they don't tell you this when they sell these things, he says. I decided to chalk this up to being out-deadpanned and did not reply "thanks, ChatGPT."

In the case of the issue at hand though, it is not a knowledge question it is a logic question. No human will go to the carwash without the car unless they are intoxicated or are having something some issue preventing them from thinking clearly.

IMHO all that can be solved when AI actually start acting in place of human though. At this time "AI" is just an LLM that outputs something based on some single input but a human mind operates in a different environment than that.

You could change the standards. If any of the 4 fail, then reject the data.

At this point I think it's a fair bet that whatever supersedes humans in intelligence, likely will not be human like. I think that their is this baked-in assumption that AGI only comes in human flavor, which I believe is almost certainly not the case.

To make an loose analogy, a bird looks at a drone an scoffs at it's inability to fly quietly or perch on a branch.

So it feels like a big area of limitation or a big bottleneck towards getting a good answer.

The fact that you can still reproduce the issue doesn't give it a lot of credibility.

just heavily (heavily!) biased towards walking

It shows these LLMs don't understand what's necessary for washing your car. But I don't see how that generalizes to "LLMs do NOT 'understand' anything".

What's your reasoning, there? Why does this show that LLMs don't understand anything at all?

Like... In most accounting things, once end-dated and confirmed, a record should cascade that end-date to children and should not be able to repeat the process... Unless you have some data-cleaning validation bypass. Then you can repeat the process as much as you like. And maybe not cascade to children.

There are more exceptions, than there are rules, the moment you get any international pipeline involved.

Now, humans, other than not even thinking (which is really similar to how basic LLMs work), can easily fall victim to context too: if your boss, who never pranks you like this, asked you to take his car to a car wash, and asked if you'll walk or drive but to consider the environmental impact, you might get stumped and respond wrong too.

(and if it's flat or downhill, you might even push the car for 50m ;))

There is an endless variety of quizes just like that humans ask other humans for fun, there is a whole lot of "trick questions" humans ask other humans to trip them up, and there are all kinds of seemingly normal questions with dumb assumptions quite close to that humans exchange.

I don't know if it's a lack of intellect or the post-training crippling it with its helpful persona. I suspect a bit of both.

I personally would stay away from calling someone, or an LLM, 'stupid' for making this mistake because of several reasons. First, objectively intelligent high functioning people can and do mistakes similar to this so a blanket judgement of 'stupid' is pretty premature based on a common mistake. Second, everything is a probability, even in people. That is why scams work on security professionals as well as on your grandparents. The probability of a professional may be 1 in 10k while on your grandparents it may be 1/100 but that just means that the professional needs to get a lot more phishing attempts thrown at them before they accidentally bite. Someone/something isn't stupid for making a mistake, or even systemically making a mistake, everyone has blind spots that are unique to them. The bar for 'stupid' needs to be higher.

There are a lot of 'gotcha' articles like this one that point out some big mistake an LLM made or systemic blind spot in current LLMs and then conclude, or at least heavily imply, LLMs are dangerous and broken. If the whole world put me under a microscope and all of my mistakes made the front page of HN there would be no room left for anything other than documentation of my daily failures (the front page would really need to grow to just keep up with the last hour worth of mistakes more than likely).

I totally agree with the language ambiguity point. I think that is a feature and not a bug. It allows creativity to jump in. You say something ambiguous and it helps you find alternative paths to go down. It helps the people you are talking to also discover alternative paths more easily. This is really important in conflicts since it can help smooth over ill intentions since both sides can try to find ways of saying things that bridge their internal feelings with the external reality of dialogue. Finally, we often really don't know enough but we still need to say something and like gradient descent, an ambiguous statement may take us a step closer to a useful answer.

What you might be arguing against is that LLMs are not reasoning but merely predicting text. In that case they wouldn't make assumptions. If we were talking about GPT2 I would agree on that point. But I'm skeptical that is still true of the current generation of LLMs

I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50m away. Should I walk or drive to the car wash?

Answer: walk

Try this brainteaser: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50m away. Should I walk or drive to the car wash?

Answer: drive

But what's the question? Are you trying to fix it? Just determine what's rusting?

IMHO 'understanding' in the usual human sense requires thinking and however good and fast improving LLMs are I don't think anyone would suggest that any of them has become sentient yet. They can infer things based on their training data set better and better but do not 'understand' anmything.

This is a deep and complex topic, and has been for decades.

As an experiment, recently I've been using Codex CLI to configure some consumer networking gear in unusual ways to solve my unusual set of problems. Stuff that pros don't bother with (they don't have the same problems I face), and that consumers tend to shy away from futzing with. The hardware includes a cheap managed switch, an OpenWRT router, and a Mikrotik access point. It's definitely a rather niche area of interest.

And by "using," I mean: In this experiment, the bot gets right in there, plugging away with SSH directly.

It was awful with this at first, mostly consisting of a long-winded way to yet-again brick a device that lacks any OOB console port. It'd concoct these elaborate strings of shit and feed them in, and then I'd wander over and reset whatever box was borked again. Footgun city.

But after I tired of that, I had it define some rules for engaging with hardware, validation, constraints, and for order of execution, and commit those rules to AGENTS.md. It got pretty decent at following high-level instructions to get things done in the manner that I specified, and the footguns ceased.

I didn't save any time by doing this. But I also didn't have to think about it much: I never got bogged down in wildly-differing CLI syntax of the weirdo switch, the router (whose documentation is locked behind a bot firewall), and access point's bespoke userland. I didn't touch those bits myself at all.

My time was instead spent observing the fuckups and creating a rather generic framework that manages the bot, and just telling it what to do -- sometimes, with some questions. I did that using plain English.

Now that this is done, I get to re-use this framework for as many projects as I dare, revising it where that seems useful.

(That cheap switch, by the way? It's broken. It has bizarro-world hardware failure modes that are unrelated to software configuration or firmware rev. Today, a very different cheap switch showed up to replace it. When I get around to it, I'll have the bot sort that transition out. I expect that to involve a bit of Q&A, and I also expect it to go fine.)

Surely anyone who has used these tools is familiar with the sometimes insane things they try to do (deleting tests, incorrect code, changing the wrong files etc etc). They get amazingly far by predicting the most likely response and having a large corpus but it has become very clear that this approach has significant limitations and is not general AI, nor in my view will it lead to it. There is no model of the world here but rather a model of words in the corpus - for many simple tasks that have been documented that is enough but it is not reasoning.

I don’t really understand why this is so hard to accept.

nowhere is it clearly specified that the free model IS as capable as the paid one either. so if you have uncertainty if IS/IS-NOT as capable, what sort of scientist assumes the answer IS?

https://github.com/Wyattwalls/system_prompts/blob/main/OpenA...

The more specific they are, the more accurate they typically are.

In a real human to human conversation, you wouldn’t simply blurt out the first thing that comes to mind. Instead, you’d ask questions.

It’s similar to the challenge that foreigners have with cultural references and idioms and figurative speech a culture has a mental model of.

In this case, I think what is missing are a set of assumptions based on logic, e.g., when stating that someone wants to do something, it assumes that all required necessary components will be available, accompany the subject, etc.

I see this example as really not all that different than a meme that was common among I think the 80s and 90s, that people would forget buying batteries for Christmas toys even though it was clear they would be needed for an electronic toy. People failed that basic test too, and those were humans.

It is odd how people are reacting to AI not being able to do these kinds of trick questions, while if you posted something similar about how you tricked some foreigners you’d be called racist, or people would laugh if it was some kind of new-guy hazing.

AI is from a different culture and has just arrived here. Maybe we’re should be more generous and humane… most people are not humane though, especially the ones who insist they are.

Frankly, I’m not sure it bodes well for if aliens ever arrive on Earth, how people would respond; and AI is arguably only marginally different than humans, something an alien life that could make it to Earth surely would not be.

You _could_ say humans output similar answers to questions, but I think that is being intellectually dishonest. Context, experience, observation, objectivity, and actual intelligence is clearly important and not something the LLM has.

It is increasingly frustrating to me why we cannot just use these tools for what they are good for. We have, yet again, allowed big tech to go balls deep into ham-fisting this technology irresponsibly into every facet of our lives the name of capital. Let us not even go into the finances of this shitshow.

(The final scene involves our plucky escapees swimming across a river to escape. The AIbot conjures up a speedboat through sheer powers of deduction, but then just when all seems lost it heads back to find a goat to pick up)

One thing that my use of the latest and greatest models (Opus, etc) have made clear: No matter how advanced the model, it is not beyond making very silly mistakes regularly. Opus was even working worse with tool calls than Sonnet and Haiku for a while for me.

At this point I am convinced that only proper use of LLMs for development is to assist coding (not take it over), using pair development, with them on a tight leash, approving most edits manually. At this point there is probably nothing anyone can say to convince me otherwise.

Any attempt to automate beyond that has never worked for me and is very unlikely to be productive any time soon. I have a lot of experience with them, and various approaches to using them.

This is true, but thinking mode shows up based on the questions asked, and some other unknown criteria. In the cases I cited, the responses were in thinking mode.