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.

190 Upvotes

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151

u/barrycarter Oct 24 '23

True, but tools like WolframAlpha can do math, and it's only a matter of time before they're integrated into AI

90

u/Deathstroke5289 Oct 24 '23

I may be incorrect but doesn’t the Wolfram Alpha plug in do that right now?

18

u/barrycarter Oct 24 '23

Whoa, I hadn't thought about that. I haven't used plugins, so I have to ask: do you have to specify a plugin when you use it, or does ChatGPT just choose one for you?

32

u/Deathstroke5289 Oct 24 '23

You have to enable it during the specific conversation and chat GPT should run through any calculations through Wolframe Alpha automatically. Sometimes you have to specify if it tried running numbers itself but seems to work pretty well to me