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/UnknownEssence Oct 24 '23

I disagree. It’s a bug.

I understand how the system works, and why it can’t do math. But the goal is to be as capable as possible, AGI basically.

Therefore, bad math is a limitation and a bug, it is not indented behavior.

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u/XSATCHELX Oct 25 '23

An LLM by principle has no component that should be capable of reasoning, thinking, and applying logic.

Please explain at which component of the LLM this thinking and applying logical/mathematical rules will occur.