Should I Drive to the Car Wash? On Grounding and a Different Kind of LLM Failure
A viral video this month showed an AI assistant confidently answering “should I go to the car wash today?” without knowing it was raining outside. The internet found it funny. The failure mode is real but distinct from the strawberry counting problem — this is not a representation issue, it is a grounding issue. The model understood the question perfectly. What it lacked was access to the state of the world the question was about.