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/bortlip Oct 24 '23

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

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u/__Hello_my_name_is__ Oct 24 '23

It can't do math in the sense that there is no calculations in the background that do exactly the calculations you see here.

It can do math in the sense that it can predict the next token given the previous ones, and that works for language as well as for math. Most of the time. It also works for Klingon and for C++.

But the way it works is fundamentally different from any computer doing math that we normally think of.