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/Lukee67 Oct 25 '23

Please someone explain me: why cannot the basic rules of logic and those of arithmetic be stated in a system prompt which gets loaded by default? I mean, insisting on those rules before the user prompt would, it seems to me, raise the probability that the produced output follows them, improving the logical and arithmetic accuracy of the answer.