alt Hacker News> so you need to tell them the specifics
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, do build separate mental models of the llm and are able to work around it).
This is a neatly isolated toy-case, which is interesting, because we can assume similar issues arise in more complex cases, only then it's much harder to reason about why something fails when it does.
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I get that issue constantly. I somehow can't get any LLM to ask me clarifying questions before spitting out a wall of text with incorrect assumptions. I find it particularly frustrating.
You would never ask a human this question. Right?
You would be surprised, however, at how much detail humans also need to understand each other. We often want AI to just "understand" us in ways many people may not initially have understood us without extra communication.
I think part of the failure is that it has this helpful assistant personality that's a bit too eager to give you the benefit of the doubt. It tries to interpret your prompt as reasonable if it can. It can interpret it as you just wanting to check if there's a queue.
Speculatively, it's falling for the trick question partly for the same reason a human might, but this tendency is pushing it to fail more.
The question is so outlandish that it is something that nobody would ever ask another human. But if someone did, then they'd reasonably expect to get a response consisting 100% of snark.
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.
Exactly, if an AI is able to curb around the basics, only then is it revolutionary
But it's a question you would never ask a human! In most contexts, humans would say, "you are kidding, right?" or "um, maybe you should get some sleep first, buddy" rather than giving you the rational thinking-exam correct response.
For that matter, if humans were sitting at the rational thinking-exam, a not insignificant number would probably second-guess themselves or otherwise manage to befuddle themselves into thinking that walking is the answer.
> That is the entire point, right? Us having to specify things that we would never specify when talking to a human.
I am not sure. If somebody asked me that question, I would try to figure out what’s going on there. What’s the trick. Of course I’d respond with asking specifics, but I guess the llvm is taught to be “useful” and try to answer as best as possible.
I would ask you to stop being a dumb ass if you asked me the question...
> Us having to specify things that we would never specify
This is known, since 1969, as the frame problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_problem. An LLM's grasp of this is limited by its corpora, of course, and I don't think much of that covers this problem, since it's not required for human-to-human communication.