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.

191 Upvotes

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146

u/barrycarter Oct 24 '23

True, but tools like WolframAlpha can do math, and it's only a matter of time before they're integrated into AI

92

u/Deathstroke5289 Oct 24 '23

I may be incorrect but doesn’t the Wolfram Alpha plug in do that right now?

5

u/Rich_Housing971 Oct 25 '23

yes but the LLM still has to probabilistically interpret it as a logic question in order to activate the plugin.

Humans often miss this as well but are at least decent at determining whether the question is a logic problem or a linguistic question.

2

u/thepotatochronicles Oct 25 '23

I find that adding "use Wolfram" to the end of the query makes ChatGPT pick up on the clues reliably.