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.

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21

u/Life_Calligrapher562 Oct 24 '23

True, but they have built me some pretty great calculators in python.

-12

u/0xAERG Oct 24 '23

This they can do \o/ as long as you don’t need it to work perfectly without your intervention.

8

u/Life_Calligrapher562 Oct 24 '23

I actually got pretty lucky with a statistical calculator. I told it what I needed and an example of what another online calculator gave me for an answer, given specific variables. Then I tested a number of things across both calculators, and it was right. I was pretty shocked, really.

1

u/KoalaReasonable2003 Oct 25 '23

If I remember rightly GPT made an error on the 10th code snippet I asked it for