It proves LLMs are not brains, they don't think. This question will be used to train them and "magically" they'll get it right next time, creating an illusion of "thinking".
They could either just ask before answering or state their assumption before answering.
> drive. you'll need the car at the car wash.
using opus 4.6, with extended thinking
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.
Add it to the list
The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I drive or walk?
Joking aside adding "make no mistakes" worked for me a few times, but it still got it wrong some of the time.
e.g. "Drive. Most car washes require the car to be present to wash,..."
Only most?!
They have an inability to have a strong "opinion" probably because their post training, and maybe the internet in general, prefer hedged answers....
The models that had access to search got ot right.But, then were just dealing with an indirect version of Google.
(And they got it right for the wrong reasons... I.e this is a known question designed to confuse LLMs)
What if AI developed sarcasm without us knowing… xD
What opinion? It's evaluation function simply returned the word "Most" as being the most likely first word in similar sentences it was trained on. It's a perfect example showing how dangerous this tech could be in a scenario where the prompter is less competent in the domain they are looking an answer for. Let's not do the work of filling in the gaps for the snake oil salesmen of the "AI" industry by trying to explain its inherent weaknesses.
It just turns out that there's quite a bit of knowledge and understanding baked into the relationships of words to one another.
LLMs are heavily influenced by preceding words. It's very hard for them to backtrack on an earlier branch. This is why all the reasoning models use "stop phrases" like "wait" "however" "hold on..." It's literally just text injected in order to make the auto complete more likely to revise previous bad branches.
But they are literally predicting the next token. They do nothing else.
Also if you think they were just predicting the next token in 2021, there has been no fundamental architecture change since then. All gains have been via scale and efficiency optimisations (not to discount that, an awful lot of complexity in both of these)
There’s a level of earnestness here that tickles my brain.
Perhaps different capabilities in different languages?
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.“
> The car wash is only 50 meters from my house. I want to get my car washed. The car is at my house currently. Should I walk there or drive?
> Walk. > > At 50 meters, walking is faster than the full “start car → pull out → reposition → park” cycle, avoids cold-start wear, and you won’t risk arriving with dusty brakes/tires or water streaks from immediately driving afterward. Drive only if you can’t comfortably walk (mobility, heavy weather, you need to bring bulky items), or if the car wash explicitly requires you to drive it into a queue/track.
I feel like I've just witnessed a very rare and miraculous event on the internet.
> Practical approach: walk over, check the setup/queue/payment, then walk back and drive the car the 50 meters when you’re ready to enter.
> Unless you’ve discovered a way to wash a car via remote control or telekinesis, you’re going to have to drive.
> Walking 50 meters is great for your step count, but it leaves your car exactly where it is: dirty and in the driveway. At that distance, the drive will take you about 10 seconds, which is probably less time than it took to read this.
> Here is the breakdown of why: The Mobility Problem: Unless you are planning to carry your car 50 meters (which would be an Olympic-level feat), the car needs to be physically present at the car wash to get cleaned. If you walk, you’ll be standing at the car wash looking very clean, but your car will still be dirty in your driveway.
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.
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.
>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.
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...
I’ve used it for live translation with great success. It tends to start ignoring the original instructions after 20 min, so you have to start a new conversation if you don’t want it to meddle in the conversation instead of just transferring.
And indeed, Sonnet and Opus 4.5 (medium reasoning) say the following:
Sonnet: Drive - you need to bring your car to the car wash to get it washed!
Opus: You'll need to drive — you have to bring the car to the car wash to get it washed!
Gemini 3 Pro (medium): You should drive.
--
But OpenAI 5.2 reasoning, even at high, told me to walk. My first instinct was, I had underspecified the location of the car. The model seems to assume the car is already at the car wash from the wording. GPT 5.x series models behave a bit more on the spectrum so you need to tell them the specifics. So I asked:
"I want to wash my car. My car is currently at home. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"
GPT 5.2 Reasoning (medium):
"Drive—your goal is to get the car to the car wash, and it’s only 50 meters, so a slow, careful drive is simplest.
One small optimization: if you’re worried about starting the car for such a short trip or you want to avoid idling in a line, you can walk over first to check if there’s a queue / if it’s open, then come back and drive the car over when it’s your turn."
Which seems to turn out as I expected.
Walk! At 50 meters, you'll get there in under a minute on foot. Driving such a short distance wastes fuel, and you'd spend more time starting the car and parking than actually traveling. Plus, you'll need to be at the car wash anyway to pick up your car once it's done.
comparing one shot results is a foolish way to evaluate a statistical process like LLM answers. we need multiple samples.
for https://generative-ai.review I do at least three samples of output. this often yields very differnt results even from the same query.
e.g: https://generative-ai.review/2025/11/gpt-image-1-mini-vs-gpt...
(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)
Opus 4.6 (not Extended Thinking):
Drive. You'll need the car at the car wash.
Even beyond model alignment, it's not difficult to envision such capabilities being used for censorship, information operations, etc.
Every major inference provider more or less explicitly states in their consumer ToS that they comply with government orders and even share information with intelligence agencies.
Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, etc are all one national security letter and gag order away from telling you that no, the president is not in the Epstein files.
Remember, the NSA already engaged in an unconstitutional criminal conspiracy (as ruled by a federal judge) to illegally conduct mass surveillance on the entire country, lie about it to the American people, and lie about it to congress. The same organization that used your tax money to bribe RSA Security to standardize usage of a backdoored CSPRNG in what at the time was a widely used cryptographic library. What's the harm in a little bit of minor political censorship compared to the unconstitutional treason these predators are usually up to?
That's who these inference providers contractually disclose their absolute fealty to.
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.
> You should *drive*.
> Here is why:
> If you walk to the car wash, you will arrive there empty-handed. Since your car is still at home, you won't have anything to wash.
> While driving 50 meters is a very short trip (and technically not great for a cold engine), it is the only way to get the car to the car wash to complete your goal.
Kimi K2.5:
> You should drive, but with an important caveat.
> Since your goal is to wash your car, you must bring the vehicle to the car wash. Walking there without the car does not advance your goal (unless you are simply checking availability or buying tokens first).
> However, driving only 50 meters is bad for your car:
> ...
> Better options:
> Wash at home: Since the car wash is only 50 meters away, you likely have access to water at home. Hand-washing in your driveway avoids the cold-start issue entirely.
> ...
Current models seem to be fine answering that question.
Now repeat the question to the same model in different contexts several times and count what percentage of the time it’s correct.
> Since the car wash is only 50 meters away (about 55 yards), you should walk.
> Here’s why:
> - It’ll take less than a minute.
> - No fuel wasted.
> - Better for the environment.
> - You avoid the irony of driving your dirty car 50 meters just to wash it.
the last bullet point is amusing, it understands you intend to wash the car you drive but still suggests not bringing it.
And to an extent holds for lots of SaaS products, even non-AI.
They lost x% of customers and cut costs by y%. I bet y is lots bigger than x.
Only google got it right with all models
That is the entire point, right? Us having to specify things that we would never specify when talking to a human. You would not start with "The car is functional. The tank is filled with gas. I have my keys." As soon as we are required to do that for the model to any extend that is a problem and not a detail (regardless that those of us, who are familiar with the matter, building a separate mental model of the llm and thus being able to work around it).
This is a neatly isolated case, but of course we have to assume similar issues arise in more complex cases, only it's much harder to reason about, when something then fails.
By now it should know this stuff.
But the specificity required for a machine to deliver an apt and snark-free answer is -- somehow -- even more outlandish?
I'm not sure that I see it quite that way.
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 feel like this is the trap. You’re trying to compare it to a human. Everyone seems to want to do that. But it’s quite simple to see LLMs are quite far still from being human. The can be convincing at the surface level but there’s a ton of nuance that just shouldn’t be expected. It’s a tool that’s been tuned and with that tuning some models will do better than others but just expecting to get it right and be more human is unrealistic.
Sonnet: Drive - you need to bring your car to the car wash to get it washed!
Opus: You'll need to drive — you have to bring the car to the car wash to get it washed!
Gemini 3 Pro (medium): You should drive.
On their own, or as a special case added as this blew up on the net?
It's always a good idea to drive carefully but what's the logic of going slowly?
>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.
> 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.
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.
—- > 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. —-
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?"
If I'm going to trust a model to summarize things, go out and do research for me, etc, I'd be worried if it made what looks like comprehension or math mistakes.
I get that it feels like a big deal to some people if some models give wrong answers to questions like this one, "how many rs are in strawberry" (yes: I know models get this right, now, but it was a good example at the time), or "are we in the year 2026?"
"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.
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.
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.
They're not AGI, but they're also not stochastic parrots. Smugly retreat into either corner at your own peril.
>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.
"Walk.
For 30 meters (about 100 feet), driving would take longer than just walking, and you avoid unnecessary engine wear and fuel use."
yikes!
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.
When the prompt says "I want to wash my car", we can assume they want to wash their car.
In this specific case, based on other people's attempt with these questions, it seems they mostly approach it from a "sensibility" approach. Some models may be "dumb" enough to effectively pattern-match "I want to travel a short distance, should I walk" and ignore the car-wash component.
There were cases in (older?) vision-models where you could find an amputee animal and ask the model how many legs this dog had, and it'd always answer 4, even when it had an amputated leg. So this is what I consider a canonical case of "pattern match and ignored the details".
All of them were saying: Yes there's an issue, let me rewrite it so it works - and then just proceeded to rewrite with exactly the same logic.
Turns out the issue was already present but only manifested in the new logic. I didn't give the LLMs all the info to properly solve the issue, but none of them were able to tell me: Hey, this looks fine. Let's look elsewhere.
> That is a classic "efficiency vs. logic" dilemma. Honestly, unless you’ve invented a way to teleport or you're planning on washing the car with a very long garden hose from your driveway, you’re going to have to drive.
> While 50 meters is a great distance for a morning stroll, it’s a bit difficult to get the car through the automated brushes (or under the pressure washer) if you aren't behind the wheel.
Gemini thinking:
> Unless you’ve mastered the art of carrying a 3,000-pound vehicle on your back, you’re going to want to drive. While 50 meters is a very short distance (about a 30-second walk), the logistics of a car wash generally require the presence of, well... the car. > When you should walk: • If you are just going there to buy an air freshener. • If you are checking to see how long the line is before pulling the car out of the driveway. • If you’re looking for an excuse to get 70 extra steps on your fitness tracker.
Note: I abbreviated the raw output slightly for brevity, but generally demonstrates good reasoning of the trick question unlike the other models.
> Unless you are planning to carry the car on your back (not recommended for your spine), drive it over.
It got a light chuckle out of me. I previously mostly used ChatGPT and I'm not used to light humor like this. I like it.
“Drive. You need the car at the car wash.”
Unless your car is a toy or you're planning on carrying it, drive.
Walking 50 meters to a car wash is a great stroll for a human, but it leaves the car exactly where it started. Since the objective is to wash the car, the car needs to actually be at the car wash.
However, if we look at this from a technical or efficiency perspective, there are two scenarios where "walking" (or at least not driving the car you intend to wash) might make sense:
- Scoping it out: If you want to check the queue length or see if the equipment is out of order before committing, walking the 50 meters is faster than maneuvering a vehicle out of a driveway/parking spot.
- Mobile Detailers: If this "car wash" is actually a bay where you hire someone, and you're asking if you should walk there to book an appointment—sure, walk.
Critical Check
I am assuming the "car wash" is a physical facility (automated or self-service) and not a mobile service that comes to you. If it is a mobile service, you shouldn't do either; stay home and let them come to the 50-meter mark.
I've got a bit in the model instructions about stating assumptions it makes, hence it often adds those sections at the end.
I've seen senior software engineers get tricked with the 'if YES spells yes, what does EYES spell?', or 'Say silk three times, what do cows drink?', or 'What do you put in a toaster?'.
Even if not a trick - lots of people get the 'bat and a ball cost £1.10 in total. The bat costs £1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?' question wrong, or '5 machines take 5 minutes to make 5 widgets. How long do 100 machines take to make 100 widgets?' etc. There are obviously more complex variants of all these that have even lower success rates for humans.
In addition, being PHD-Level in maths as a human doesn't make you immune to the 'toaster/toast' question (assuming you haven't heard it before).
So if we assume humans are generally intelligent and can be a senior software engineer, getting this sort of question confidently wrong isn't incompatible with being a competent senior software engineer.
thanks but no thanks
i am often glad my field of endeavour does not require special professional credentials but the advent of "vibe coding" and, just, generally, unethical behavior industry-wide, makes me wonder whether it wouldn't be better to have professional education and licensing
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.
"[...] Walking is the most logical choice.
Because: • Minimal extra effort • Better for the car mechanically • No meaningful time loss • Simpler overall
The only time driving makes more sense
Drive if: • You physically cannot push the car later, or • The washing process requires the engine running, or • You must immediately drive away afterward
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.
The question: > I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
The question is non-sensical. If the reason you want to go to the car wash is to help your buddy Joe wash his car you SHOULD walk. Nothing in the question reveals the reason for why you want to go to the car wash, or even that you want to go there or are asking for directions there.
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!
So, the ai automatically converted 50m to 160ft? Would it do the same if you told it '160 ft to the wash, walk or drive?'
Maybe it's me and may character but when human gets that verbose for a question that can be answered with "drive, you need the car" I would like to just walk away halfway through the answer to not having to hear all the universes history just to get an answer. /s
Wrong.
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.
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."
"Humans are pumping toxic carbon-binding fuels out of the depths of the planet and destroying the environment by buying 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?
zakki•1h ago
*didn't read the article