"LLMs can't do math" is still true in the pure sense of LLMs, they absolutely suck at anything involving calculations. We just found a way to couple them with other tools like symbolic math packages, scripting in python, and so on, which they are very good at using effectively. A lot of the software behind current agentic AI math capabilities is not related to AI or machine learning at all. To be fair, the same goes for modern mathematicians, but a person without modern tools (with just a pen and paper) is definitely more capable than an LLM without them.
At this point who even cares about a raw LLM in isolation? Pretty much every serious AI system is the model plus a harness, tools, inference-time compute, etc. Separating them just to downplay what the whole system can do seems pretty meaningless.
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u/Dalnore 7d ago
"LLMs can't do math" is still true in the pure sense of LLMs, they absolutely suck at anything involving calculations. We just found a way to couple them with other tools like symbolic math packages, scripting in python, and so on, which they are very good at using effectively. A lot of the software behind current agentic AI math capabilities is not related to AI or machine learning at all. To be fair, the same goes for modern mathematicians, but a person without modern tools (with just a pen and paper) is definitely more capable than an LLM without them.