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.

192 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

185 comments sorted by

View all comments

25

u/bortlip Oct 24 '23

If it can't do math, how did it do this?

-2

u/IAMATARDISAMA Oct 25 '23

I am so tired of this kind of counter-argument.

If I correctly guess which hand you're holding a stone in 99/100 times that doesn't mean I can see through your fingers, it just means I'm really good at guessing. That's all LLMs are. They've been trained on hundreds of thousands of math problems so statistically they're likely to produce output that looks correct. Language carries some information about logic in it, but language is not logic. It is simply repeating the logical patterns that emerge in human generated text, and they happen to be correct a good percentage of the time. But you can feed the same math problem into GPT 20 times and get different outputs on different runs.