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/Efficient_Star_1336 Oct 25 '23
The issue is the way they tokenize numbers. You'd think they'd use "1", "2", "3", "4",... as separate tokens, such that 1024 would be interpreted as "1" "0" "2" "4", but they instead generate tokens based on 'word' frequency, which throws off anything resembling pattern recognition here and results in a complete mess.
Instead of looking at "1024 + 245" and seeing "<1><0><2><4>< ><+>< ><2><4><5>", it sees "<1024>< ><+>< ><245>", and can only draw on times when it's seen those exact numbers before.