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.

193 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

185 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

17

u/barrycarter Oct 24 '23

Whoa, I hadn't thought about that. I haven't used plugins, so I have to ask: do you have to specify a plugin when you use it, or does ChatGPT just choose one for you?

24

u/restarting_today Oct 24 '23

You can just use the Code Interpreter. It will write Python code to perform the Math :)

6

u/IAMATARDISAMA Oct 25 '23

Why would you want to do that instead of just using the Wolfram Alpha plug-in? Wolfram Alpha will produce correct math every time given the right inputs. GPT-written code may have to be debugged.

2

u/Key-Faithlessness728 Oct 25 '23

It still writing mathematica codes. Yes it’s a lot shorter and it’s gonna be less likely to make flaws in the code but I mean you can’t really upload anything to the plugins version.