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Obligatory reminder that today's so called "AGI" has trouble figuring out whether I should walk or drive to the car wash in order to get my dirty car washed. It

Obligatory reminder that today's so called "AGI" has trouble figuring out whether I should walk or drive to the car wash in order to get my dirty car washed. It has to think through the scenario step by step, whereas any human can instantly grok the right answer.

SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago
I just don't know how to engage with these criticisms anymore. Do you not see how increasingly convoluted the "simple question LLMs can't answer" bar has gotten since 2022? Do the human beings you know not have occasional brain farts where they recommend dumb things that don't make much sense?
- bigstrat2003 8mo ago
  > Do the human beings you know not have occasional brain farts where they recommend dumb things that don't make much sense? Not that dumb, no. That's why it's laughable to claim that LLMs are intelligent.
  - SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago
    I should note for epistemic honesty that I expected I would be able to come up with an example of a mistake I made recently that was clearly equally dumb, and now I don't have a response to offer because I can't actually come up with that example.
- maplethorpe 8mo ago
  > Do the human beings you know not have occasional brain farts where they recommend dumb things that don't make much sense? I completely agree. I'm ashamed to admit, I've actually walked to the car wash without my car on more than one occasion. We all make mistakes!
wongarsu 8mo ago
The idea/hope is that a video model would answer the car wash problem correctly. There are exactly the kinds of issues you have to solve to avoid teleporting objects around in a video, so whenever we manage more than a couple seconds of coherent video we will have something that understands the real world much better than text-based models. Then we "just" have to somehow make a combined model that has this kind of understanding and can write text and make tool calls Yes, this is kind of like Tesla promising full self driving in 2016
reducesuffering 8mo ago
What are you talking about? OpenAI's ChatGPT free tier (that everyone uses) answers this in the first sentence within a couple seconds. "If your goal is to get your dirty car washed… you should probably drive it to the car wash "
- toraway 8mo ago
  That problem went viral weeks ago so is no longer a valid test. At the time it was consistently tripping up all the SOTA models at least 50% of the time (you also have to use a sample > 1 given huge variation from even the exact same wording for each attempt). The large hosted model providers always "fix" these issues as best as they can after they become popular. It's a consistent pattern repeated many times now, benefitting from this exact scenario seemingly "debunking" it well after the fact. Often the original behavior can be replicated after finding sufficient distance of modified wording/numbers/etc from the original prompt.
  - reducesuffering 8mo ago
    I don't understand what occasional hiccups prove. The models can pass college acceptance tests in advanced educational topics better than 99% of the human population, and because they occasionally have a shortcoming, it means they're worse than humans somehow? Those edge cases are quickly going from 1% -> 0.01% too... "any human can instantly grok the right answer." When asking a human about general world knowledge, they don't have the generality to give good answers for 90% of it. Even very basic questions humans like this, humans will trip up on many many more than the frontier LLMs.
  - waisbrot 8mo ago
    For example, I just asked ChatGPT "The boat wash is 50 meters down the street. Should I drive, sail, or walk there to get my yacht detailed?" and it recommended walking. I'm sure with a tiny bit more effort, OpenAI could patch it to the point where it's a lot harder to confuse with this specific flavor of problem, but it doesn't alter the overall shape.
    - 8mo ago

SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago

I just don't know how to engage with these criticisms anymore. Do you not see how increasingly convoluted the "simple question LLMs can't answer" bar has gotten since 2022? Do the human beings you know not have occasional brain farts where they recommend dumb things that don't make much sense?

bigstrat2003 8mo ago
> Do the human beings you know not have occasional brain farts where they recommend dumb things that don't make much sense? Not that dumb, no. That's why it's laughable to claim that LLMs are intelligent.
- SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago
  I should note for epistemic honesty that I expected I would be able to come up with an example of a mistake I made recently that was clearly equally dumb, and now I don't have a response to offer because I can't actually come up with that example.
maplethorpe 8mo ago
> Do the human beings you know not have occasional brain farts where they recommend dumb things that don't make much sense? I completely agree. I'm ashamed to admit, I've actually walked to the car wash without my car on more than one occasion. We all make mistakes!

wongarsu 8mo ago

The idea/hope is that a video model would answer the car wash problem correctly. There are exactly the kinds of issues you have to solve to avoid teleporting objects around in a video, so whenever we manage more than a couple seconds of coherent video we will have something that understands the real world much better than text-based models. Then we "just" have to somehow make a combined model that has this kind of understanding and can write text and make tool calls Yes, this is kind of like Tesla promising full self driving in 2016

reducesuffering 8mo ago

What are you talking about? OpenAI's ChatGPT free tier (that everyone uses) answers this in the first sentence within a couple seconds. "If your goal is to get your dirty car washed… you should probably drive it to the car wash "

toraway 8mo ago
That problem went viral weeks ago so is no longer a valid test. At the time it was consistently tripping up all the SOTA models at least 50% of the time (you also have to use a sample > 1 given huge variation from even the exact same wording for each attempt). The large hosted model providers always "fix" these issues as best as they can after they become popular. It's a consistent pattern repeated many times now, benefitting from this exact scenario seemingly "debunking" it well after the fact. Often the original behavior can be replicated after finding sufficient distance of modified wording/numbers/etc from the original prompt.
- reducesuffering 8mo ago
  I don't understand what occasional hiccups prove. The models can pass college acceptance tests in advanced educational topics better than 99% of the human population, and because they occasionally have a shortcoming, it means they're worse than humans somehow? Those edge cases are quickly going from 1% -> 0.01% too... "any human can instantly grok the right answer." When asking a human about general world knowledge, they don't have the generality to give good answers for 90% of it. Even very basic questions humans like this, humans will trip up on many many more than the frontier LLMs.
- waisbrot 8mo ago
  For example, I just asked ChatGPT "The boat wash is 50 meters down the street. Should I drive, sail, or walk there to get my yacht detailed?" and it recommended walking. I'm sure with a tiny bit more effort, OpenAI could patch it to the point where it's a lot harder to confuse with this specific flavor of problem, but it doesn't alter the overall shape.
  - 8mo ago