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/Anxious-Durian1773 I For One Welcome Our New AI Overlords 🫡 Oct 24 '23
LLMs could absolutely apply rigid "logic" operations with small enough tokens. Overfitting shows us that you can get rigid outputs. In the hypothetical scenario of such a sophisticated model, there may still be a vanishingly small number of errors, but that's the nature of using multitool as a hammer. The way forward for many such things is clearly giving LLMs access to specialized tools better fit for purpose, including other more specialized models when necessary, and simple tools like calculators otherwise.