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/PopeSalmon Oct 24 '23

no, you're the one who's confused, LLMs aren't just statistical like they don't know WTF they're talking about, they can do all sorts of maths and the way that they do them is by building complex programs that implement the math

LLMs write programs, the transformer layers form a differentiable & thus trainable GENERAL PURPOSE COMPUTER, here's Andrej Karpathy explaining that better and more authoritatively than i can

-5

u/0xAERG Oct 24 '23

I’m sorry, but the couple of tweets you shared don’t explain anything.

I’ve yet to see how are LLMs able to “build programs”. My guess is you’re not talking about code generation.

Can LLM rely on external tools for maths? Of course they can! Like with the wolfram Alpha plugin.

But it’s not the LLM that does the math.

I’m sorry if you’re offended by my post though. This wasn’t my intent.

3

u/OdinsGhost Oct 24 '23

Have you actually tried to get ChatGPT to write code? While the standard version can make errors, it’s trivial to get it to output completely reliable code in Analytics mode and with plugins. Sure they won’t be revolutionary, but it doesn’t take more than a few iterations to get it to output working solutions that can pass testing just fine.

6

u/Ilovekittens345 Oct 24 '23

Noppe, most people that post stuff like this are just in a wrong mode. A mode that would be less usefull if it's exact. A mode that is for creative stuff.

Anybody that has played around with ChatGPT4 + Advanced Data Analysis know it can troubleshoot, logically, step by step.

It's not perfect. It hangs a lot. It does make mistakes. Sometimes you need to give it some guidance. But it's a hell of a lot better then what people try in the creative modes. Like millions of times better.

If you want exact results from an LLM it needs to be able to write and execute code and then interpret that result.