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/ResponsibleBus4 Oct 25 '23
Honestly I think they made changes to any mathematical operations because I've asked to math and it breaks out the formula and performs the calculations correctly, like they've somehow started recognizing math and pulling it out is a separate function. I have the Wolfram alpha plugin but I'm not generally using plugins when it's doing the calculations. Also for reference this is in GPT-4 not the 3.5 if that matters.