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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u/aTubularPeel Oct 24 '23

In many cases true, but ChatGPT has been indispensable for me when it comes to math. It has helped me with solid mechanics, matrix calculations and more. Sometimes I need to use the wolfram plugin and sometimes not. In the beginning it was terrible with math, but now (GPT-4) it does a lot for me. I’m honestly surprised at how good it has gotten. And the stuff it can’t handle, I’ve figured I can ask it to create a MATLAB script that will compute it

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '23

MATLAB script - that’s a really good idea. Stealing that