b) Some models released before the car wash problem was discovered would consistently get it right
c) Hardcoding it is pointless. No one is seriously asking that. It's just a trick question. Hardcoding one trick question won't fix its weakness at other simple trick questions.
d) Since it went viral on the internet, the next time they updated the knowledge cutoff, the LLM would likely be aware of the trick. It will fix itself without the labs doing anything special, even assuming the new models weren't smart enough to naturally figure it out.
Meh. The car wash problem is an underspecified statement. It's like, hey, I just popped into existence and someone asked me if they should drive to the car wash nearby.
It's not an insane assumption that the user isn't dumb and has some other reason to be asking the question other than it being a trick/stupid question (duh, if you want to wash your car you need to drive it to the car wash!). Taking it as some ultimate measure of intelligence simply doesn't make sense to me.
For the normie guy who used google search just to get to facebook, ELIZA is much cheaper to run than a fully fledged GPT. It's just sensible business wise. Trash the brain of the already poorly educated user to use cheaper AI on him.
It turns out, oddly enough, that it's possible for it to be both. AI can simultaneously be used to destroy the commons with slop and also make contributions to new math (though isn't the jury still out on whether part of the idea was stolen from human mathematicians?)
In an embarrassing display, the manager over my arm of the company got told off by his manager for spamming him (and clients) with AI slop emails. And then was told by one of the regional managers for using Copilot generating a bunch of client-facing posters and images with phrasing that had not passed any sort of legal or basic fact checking.
The people going all in on it don't realize the downsides, limitations, or understand how they come off to other people with it all.
I think people who make being smart their whole identity are a out to use AI to turn the rest of the population into indentured servants.
The comparison between ELIZA and LLMs is valid you boil it down to "humans evolved for 6-7 million years, had spoken language for 500k years, but have only had something non-human that could generate convincingly novel language well enough to hold a conversation for a few decades".
There's no inherent reason it can't turn out having a non-human generate convincing enough language for conversation isn't a complete evolutionary blindspot the same way the short form feed has pretty much one-shotted society...
LLM chatbots are software designed to manipulate, addict, and mine data. Just like social media before it. But anyone who bothers to read the output in a domain they understand will discover they aren't all that no matter who OpenAI steals research from.
Or perhaps their wallets. There are a lot of programmers here. Some of them think that AI is the death of their profession, rather than a change in it.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
I was a programmer. AI is the evolution of my career. I'm in an interesting place. I've never been good at interviewing and I have certainly only gotten worse due to an admitted atrophy of thinking in "code." But I've been putting more effort in designing systems (agentic and otherwise) and building things at work as for fun.
It's been an absolute boon to finally build out all of the fun side projects I had always dreamed of, and after showing one off to some people I might even be able to monetize.
On the other hand I acknowledge that other people dont want to embrace LLM driven development for one reason or another, and I respect that. People got into the industry for different reasons , but code was always just a means to an ends for me.
I wonder though: Was the code ever the important part, or was it just the ability to reason through complex problems in a specific way that mattered?
Code forces you to think in a specific and valuable way. You can do that in English as well, and maybe even get more done faster... but it's a skill that will take time to master.
