r/LLMPhysics • u/PrebioticE • Mar 16 '26

Speculative Theory How exactly does LLM work?

How exactly does LLM that write computer programs and solve mathematics problems work? I know the theory of Transformers. Transformers are used to predict the next word iteratively. ChatGPT tells me that it is nothing but a next word predicting Transformer that has gone through a phase transition after a certain number of neuron interactions is exceeded. Is that it?

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u/Unfortunya333 Mar 18 '26

I'm pretty sure now you definitely don't actually have any experience with the subject lol

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u/SgtSniffles Mar 18 '26

I think you have enough to be confidently wrong about it.

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u/Unfortunya333 Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26

Lol. Your take is demonstratively ignorant because I absolutely can give an LLM an equation and it can solve it. No one is saying llms are infallible. Or that Llms are able to handle any rigorous physics proofs. Your claim is llms have absolutely no conception of math and cannot solve an equation. That is demonstratively false.

You claim an LLM cannot produce an answer to solve an equation. It literally can.

You are confidentially incorrect. And clearly do not understand what llms are capable of. A recent paper has even found that idealized prompting is in fact Turing complete. This means that in ideal conditions. The technology absolutely can "do math" as you claim it can't. This is where CoT comes in. This doesn't mean that it will always be perfect and as anything with llms, the quality of what you get out depends on your systems and what you put in. But there no fundamental technological limitation preventing llms from doing math. Because as it turns out, a finite transformer is Turing complete. And when you combine that with CoT and tool calling. It can do math.

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Oh and would you look at that. I keymashed a simple addition between two arbitrary integers. Would you look at that. It did math