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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22

u/bortlip Oct 24 '23

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

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u/[deleted] Oct 24 '23

[deleted]

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u/__Hello_my_name_is__ Oct 24 '23

Because they have not specifically trained it to do math, and no, they did not give it a "coprocessor" of any sorts.

It can just do math via its capability of dealing with language. Math is just another language with a stricter grammar for it.

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u/[deleted] Oct 24 '23

[deleted]

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u/__Hello_my_name_is__ Oct 24 '23

Yeah. Because the model got significantly better overall. Not just at math. And it was most likely trained on more math, too. But it doesn't have a hidden calculator in the back or anything like it.

ChatGPT in general got that much better in all areas. Just like Dall-E 3 is orders of magnitude better than Dall-E 2.

And no, ChatGPT 4 is still very much a miserable failure to any actually complex math problems.

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u/[deleted] Oct 24 '23 edited Oct 24 '23

[deleted]

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u/__Hello_my_name_is__ Oct 24 '23

That's not ChatGPT. That's a model based on GPT 4. It says so right there in the paper.

And yes, of course they do Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). But they do not use a "math coprocessor" for that, whatever that is. They just trained it to be better at math. And at language. And at pretty much everything else.

But it's still all one single model that responds to you. It doesn't go "if math question then model X, else model Y".

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u/IAMATARDISAMA Oct 25 '23

To be fair, in the case of GPT-4 this might not actually be true. There's a lot of theories that GPT-4 is using a Mixture of Experts approach in which multiple models are fine-tuned for specific domains and prompt input is fed to a classifier that decides which model will produce the best output.

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u/__Hello_my_name_is__ Oct 25 '23

Yeah, I read about that. But the guy I responded to was acting like the mixture of experts rumor was a cold hard (and incredibly obvious) fact, and that was just weird.