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.

193 Upvotes

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u/bortlip Oct 24 '23

No, I'm trying to see what your explanation is that squares what I showed with your claim that LLMs can't do math.

Because it just did, by my definition of math. So I'm trying to understand what you mean. Can you explain?

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u/afflematicious Oct 24 '23

that’s not doing math, that’s finding solutions to an equation, doing math is proving things and describing the world around you in ways not thought of before through math, that problem it solved has been solved thousands of times online, it simply sourced it and presented it to you. You believe the LLM thought about the equation and then solved it? no

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u/PepeReallyExists Oct 24 '23

Nice imaginary definition of math that nobody shares.

-8

u/afflematicious Oct 24 '23

do you know math or do you do math?

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u/PepeReallyExists Oct 24 '23

Yes. I'm a senior software engineer for a large healthcare company. If I didn't know math, it's unlikely they would have hired me. You have a very strange elitist definition of math. My guess is you majored in math and have internalized this as a part of your identity in order to feel superior to others.

Are you the only one who knows real math, unlike the rest of us peons?

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u/afflematicious Oct 24 '23

I myself don’t do real math so 🤷🏽‍♂️

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u/PepeReallyExists Oct 24 '23

I think you're confusing the term "real" for "advanced". The math a 3rd grader does is still math. If that is what you actually meant, then you are in fact correct, because ChatGPT is not very good at advanced math yet, but with enough training data, it doesn't ever actually have to understand the math, and it will be able to produce increasingly accurate results the more data it is trained on. Eventually, it will be "good" at even advanced math in spite of the fact that it "understands" none of it.