6 ms·

| I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive? ● Drive. The car needs to be at the car wash. Wonder if this is just random

| I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive? ● Drive. The car needs to be at the car wash. Wonder if this is just randomness because its an LLM, or if you have different settings than me?

shaneoh 5mo ago
My settings are pretty standard: % claude Claude Code v2.1.111 Opus 4.7 (1M context) with xhigh effort · Claude Max ~/... Welcome to Opus 4.7 xhigh! · /effort to tune speed vs. intelligence I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive? Walk. 50 meters is shorter than most parking lots — you'd spend more time starting the car and parking than walking there. Plus, driving to a car wash you're about to use defeats the purpose if traffic or weather dirties it en route.
TeMPOraL 5mo ago
Idk but ironically, I had to re-read the first part of GP's comment three times, wondering WTF they're implying a mistake, before I noticed it's the car wash, not the car, that's 50 meters away. I'd say it's a very human mistake to make.
- thfuran 5mo ago
  I don't want my computer to make human mistakes.
  - scrollaway 5mo ago
    then don't train it on human data
  - AgentOrange1234 5mo ago
    It may be inescapable for problems where we need to interpret human language?
  - jasonfarnon 5mo ago
    then throw away the turing test
- magicalist 5mo ago
  > I'd say it's a very human mistake to make. >> It'll take you under a minute, and driving 50 meters barely gets the engine warm — plus you'd just have to park again at the other end. Honestly, by the time you started the car, you'd already be there on foot. It talks about starting, driving, and parking the car, clearly reasoning about traveling that distance in the car not to the car. It did not make the same mistake you did.
- toraway 5mo ago
  We truly do not need to lower the bar to the floor whenever an LLM makes an embarrassing logical error, particularly when the excuses don't line up at all with the reasoning in its explanation.
- 59nadir 5mo ago
  LLMs do not have trouble reading, it didn't make the mistake you made and it wouldn't. You missed a word, LLMs cannot miss words. It's not even remotely a human mistake.
lambda 5mo ago
There is a certain amount of it which is the randomness of an LLM. You really want to ask most questions like this several times. That said, I have several local models I run on my laptop that I've asked this question to 10-20 times while testing out different parameters that have answered this consistently correctly.
reddit_clone 5mo ago
To me Claude Opus 4.6 seems even more confused. I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive? Walk. It's 50 meters — you're going there to clean the car anyway, so drive it over if it needs washing, but if you're just dropping it off or it's a self-service place, walking is fine for that distance.
- lr1970 5mo ago
  Just asked Claude Code with Opus-4.6. The answer was short "Drive. You need a car at the car wash". No surprises, works as expected.
  - onemoresoop 5mo ago
    Yeah, it was probably patched. It could reason novel problems only of you ask it to pay attention to some particular detail a.k.a. handholding.. Same would happen with the the sheep and the wolf and the cabbage puzzle. If you l formulated similarly, there is a wolf and a cabbage without mentioning the sheep, it would summon up the sheep into existence at a random step. It was patched shortly after.
    - jameshart 5mo ago
      I’m not sure ‘patched’ is the right word here. Are you suggesting they edited the LLM weights to fix cabbage transportation and car wash question answering?
      - TheLNL 5mo ago
        They might have further trained the model with these edgecases in the dataset
        onemoresoop 5mo ago
        Whatever it was, that’s not real thinking, we can possibly patch all knowledge and even if we did, it would become crystallize somehow.
kalcode 5mo ago
I've tried these with Claude various times and never get the wrong answer. I don't know why, but I am leaning they have stuff like "memory" turned on and possibly reusing sessions for everything? Only thing I think explains it to me. If your always messing with the AI it might be making memories and expectations are being set. Or its the randomness. But I turned memories off, I don't like cross chats infecting my conversations context and I at worse it suggested "walk over and see if it is busy, then grab the car when line isn't busy".
- jorvi 5mo ago
  Even Gemini with no memory does hilarious things. Like, if you ask it how heavy the average man is, you usually get the right answer but occasionally you get a table that says: - 20-29: 190 pounds - 30-39: 375 pounds - 40-49: 750 pounds - 50-59: 4900 pounds Yet somehow people believe LLMs are on the cusp of replacing mathematicians, traders, lawyers and what not. At least for code you can write tests, but even then, how are you gonna trust something that can casually make such obvious mistakes?
  - dyauspitr 5mo ago
    So what? That might happen one out of 100 times. Even if it’s 1 in 10 who cares? Math is verifiable. You’ve just saved yourself weeks or months of work.
    - icedchai 5mo ago
      You don't think these errors compound? Generated code has 100's of little decisions. Yes, it "usually" works.
      - dyauspitr 5mo ago
        Not in my experience. With a proper TDD framework it does better than most programmers at a company who anecdotally have a bug every 2-3 tasks.
heurist 5mo ago
Claude Opus 4.7 responds with walk for me with and without adaptive thinking, but neither the basic model used when you Google search or GPT 5.4 do.
russfink 5mo ago
Or, the first time a mistake is detected, a correction is automatically applied.
holoduke 5mo ago
--------> I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive? Walk. It's 50 meters — driving there and back takes longer than walking, and you'd just be dirtying the car you're about to clean. ---------> haha but how can i wash my car then? Walk to the car wash first to check what they offer — many have self-service bays where you bring your car, or full-service where they wash it for you. If it's self-service, then drive over with the dirty car. If full-service, drive over and they handle it. Either way, the car needs to end up at the wash — the walk was just to scout it out. Or just drive straight there; 50 meters of extra dirt won't matter. ----------> you, you sound like a politician. Are you sure your first answer was really reasoned like your second answer? You're right, my first answer was nonsense. I pattern-matched on "50 meters = walk" without thinking about the actual task. You can't wash a car without the car being there. Just drive.

shaneoh 5mo ago

My settings are pretty standard: % claude Claude Code v2.1.111 Opus 4.7 (1M context) with xhigh effort · Claude Max ~/... Welcome to Opus 4.7 xhigh! · /effort to tune speed vs. intelligence I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive? Walk. 50 meters is shorter than most parking lots — you'd spend more time starting the car and parking than walking there. Plus, driving to a car wash you're about to use defeats the purpose if traffic or weather dirties it en route.

TeMPOraL 5mo ago

Idk but ironically, I had to re-read the first part of GP's comment three times, wondering WTF they're implying a mistake, before I noticed it's the car wash, not the car, that's 50 meters away. I'd say it's a very human mistake to make.

thfuran 5mo ago
I don't want my computer to make human mistakes.
- scrollaway 5mo ago
  then don't train it on human data
- AgentOrange1234 5mo ago
  It may be inescapable for problems where we need to interpret human language?
- jasonfarnon 5mo ago
  then throw away the turing test
magicalist 5mo ago
> I'd say it's a very human mistake to make. >> It'll take you under a minute, and driving 50 meters barely gets the engine warm — plus you'd just have to park again at the other end. Honestly, by the time you started the car, you'd already be there on foot. It talks about starting, driving, and parking the car, clearly reasoning about traveling that distance in the car not to the car. It did not make the same mistake you did.
toraway 5mo ago
We truly do not need to lower the bar to the floor whenever an LLM makes an embarrassing logical error, particularly when the excuses don't line up at all with the reasoning in its explanation.
59nadir 5mo ago
LLMs do not have trouble reading, it didn't make the mistake you made and it wouldn't. You missed a word, LLMs cannot miss words. It's not even remotely a human mistake.

lambda 5mo ago

There is a certain amount of it which is the randomness of an LLM. You really want to ask most questions like this several times. That said, I have several local models I run on my laptop that I've asked this question to 10-20 times while testing out different parameters that have answered this consistently correctly.

reddit_clone 5mo ago

To me Claude Opus 4.6 seems even more confused. I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive? Walk. It's 50 meters — you're going there to clean the car anyway, so drive it over if it needs washing, but if you're just dropping it off or it's a self-service place, walking is fine for that distance.

lr1970 5mo ago
Just asked Claude Code with Opus-4.6. The answer was short "Drive. You need a car at the car wash". No surprises, works as expected.
- onemoresoop 5mo ago
  Yeah, it was probably patched. It could reason novel problems only of you ask it to pay attention to some particular detail a.k.a. handholding.. Same would happen with the the sheep and the wolf and the cabbage puzzle. If you l formulated similarly, there is a wolf and a cabbage without mentioning the sheep, it would summon up the sheep into existence at a random step. It was patched shortly after.
  - jameshart 5mo ago
    I’m not sure ‘patched’ is the right word here. Are you suggesting they edited the LLM weights to fix cabbage transportation and car wash question answering?
    - TheLNL 5mo ago
      They might have further trained the model with these edgecases in the dataset
      - onemoresoop 5mo ago
        Whatever it was, that’s not real thinking, we can possibly patch all knowledge and even if we did, it would become crystallize somehow.

kalcode 5mo ago

I've tried these with Claude various times and never get the wrong answer. I don't know why, but I am leaning they have stuff like "memory" turned on and possibly reusing sessions for everything? Only thing I think explains it to me. If your always messing with the AI it might be making memories and expectations are being set. Or its the randomness. But I turned memories off, I don't like cross chats infecting my conversations context and I at worse it suggested "walk over and see if it is busy, then grab the car when line isn't busy".

jorvi 5mo ago
Even Gemini with no memory does hilarious things. Like, if you ask it how heavy the average man is, you usually get the right answer but occasionally you get a table that says: - 20-29: 190 pounds - 30-39: 375 pounds - 40-49: 750 pounds - 50-59: 4900 pounds Yet somehow people believe LLMs are on the cusp of replacing mathematicians, traders, lawyers and what not. At least for code you can write tests, but even then, how are you gonna trust something that can casually make such obvious mistakes?
- dyauspitr 5mo ago
  So what? That might happen one out of 100 times. Even if it’s 1 in 10 who cares? Math is verifiable. You’ve just saved yourself weeks or months of work.
  - icedchai 5mo ago
    You don't think these errors compound? Generated code has 100's of little decisions. Yes, it "usually" works.
    - dyauspitr 5mo ago
      Not in my experience. With a proper TDD framework it does better than most programmers at a company who anecdotally have a bug every 2-3 tasks.

heurist 5mo ago

Claude Opus 4.7 responds with walk for me with and without adaptive thinking, but neither the basic model used when you Google search or GPT 5.4 do.

russfink 5mo ago

Or, the first time a mistake is detected, a correction is automatically applied.

holoduke 5mo ago

--------> I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive? Walk. It's 50 meters — driving there and back takes longer than walking, and you'd just be dirtying the car you're about to clean. ---------> haha but how can i wash my car then? Walk to the car wash first to check what they offer — many have self-service bays where you bring your car, or full-service where they wash it for you. If it's self-service, then drive over with the dirty car. If full-service, drive over and they handle it. Either way, the car needs to end up at the wash — the walk was just to scout it out. Or just drive straight there; 50 meters of extra dirt won't matter. ----------> you, you sound like a politician. Are you sure your first answer was really reasoned like your second answer? You're right, my first answer was nonsense. I pattern-matched on "50 meters = walk" without thinking about the actual task. You can't wash a car without the car being there. Just drive.