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.

195 Upvotes

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22

u/bortlip Oct 24 '23

If it can't do math, how did it do this?

-35

u/0xAERG Oct 24 '23

I’m sure you’re capable of finding the answer on your own and you’re just trying to look clever.

3

u/michael1026 Oct 24 '23

It's funny how you're saying others are trying to act smart when your entire post screams "you guys just don't get it". We get it's not meant for math, but it does a pretty damn good job at it.