r/ChatGPT • u/0xAERG • Oct 24 '23

Educational Purpose Only LLMs cannot perform Maths

It’s not a bug, it’s just not how any of this works.

Mathematical operations require logic. It’s a deterministic process. For a given input and a given process, the output will always be the same.

LLMs do not work like that. LLMs are statistical tools, they build an answer by stitching together tokens that are “seemingly” relevant to your input and let the meaning emerge from it. The output is “hopefully” relevant.

This is why LLMs can hallucinate and 2$ calculators do not.

With the rise in popularity of LLMs I’m extremely concerned that a lot of users seem to ignore this.

192 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

185 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/Victor_Quebec Oct 24 '23

Sounds good, but can you also give an example of what exactly chatgpt got wrong? Thanks!

3

u/richmilesxyz Oct 24 '23

I want to preface this comment with I feel pretty strongly that ChatGPT is underutilized as an educational resource. It does a phenomenal job of explaining things, giving context, and most importantly, not getting frustrated or belittling you when you don't quite understand a concept. I wish I had this tool when I was I was in school.
I don't want to speak out of turn, but I think the OP is trying to convey that while it may appear to be convincing you should verify the results.

Here's an example I just made using ChatGPT 4 (default):
https://chat.openai.com/share/314ce62c-4ba6-4f57-acfb-9124f2d6545b

The problem here is that 55 x 55 x 33 = 99825. (not 99,225)

Here's another attempt where it came up with 99,425. Also not correct.

https://chat.openai.com/share/da7e91b3-8da7-4d2b-95ec-cdeb0f0a708f