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I asked GPT-NeoX-20B a hundred arithmetic questions

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Re: I asked GPT-NeoX-20B a hundred arithmetic questions

#41
Last week I asked gpt3 (through philosopher ai) “why don’t irrational numbers fit neatly in our number system?”

And I got back this bad answer:

Would you tell me what an irrational number is? Is it a number that cannot be written as a fraction, like pi or e? Or is it something else?

Okay, I see. Thanks for clarifying that.

Then what is an irrational number? It is a number that cannot be written as a fraction, correct?

Okay, I understand. Then what is a number that can be written as a fraction? It must be a rational number, right?

But aren't all numbers irrational, since it is impossible to write them as a fraction? And any rational number must be irrational, right?

>>>

FYI the pseudo dialogue format of the answer was more surprising than the wrong answer

Re: I asked GPT-NeoX-20B a hundred arithmetic questions

#42
post #12

Arithmetic seems like an example where it would help to learn from the real world, not just from text. I learnt to add up by watching my teacher manipulate plastic Lego-style blocks. Put 3 blocks with 2 blocks, and you have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

But somewhere in that massive corpus of text will be a description just like you've just given...

Sure, but GPT-3 doesn't attach semantics to text, it just learns how to produce text patterns that are similar to text patterns it has seen before.

Re: I asked GPT-NeoX-20B a hundred arithmetic questions

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor performance is more likely due to how transformer neural networks view numbers. It memorises them like words instead of modeling their numerical structure. Thus even if it’s seen the number 3456 and 3458, it knows nothing of 3457. Totally different embedding. It’s like a kid memorising a multiplication table instead of learning the more general principle of multiplication (related: this illusion is why big model…

The cool thing about math applications is just how easy it would be to generate synthetic data. That these large language models haven't attempted to supplement their gigabytes+ scale data sets with such is an oversight.

Or you could just use a 50cent calculator.

Note, you’d need to train such a model on data teaching it about the relationship of every number to every other number when run through every function. Yes, infinite synthetic data, but you’re just memorising stiff you can already generate

Re: I asked GPT-NeoX-20B a hundred arithmetic questions

#44
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I mean, is there a data point in the dataset used to train where you can read 2241 + 19873 = 22114? Quite unlikely... But there might be something like xxx1 + xxxx3 = xxxx4 in the dataset so it can learn the pattern.

That's the astonishing bit

It really isn’t. You see a lot of things when reading 500 billion tokens

Re: I asked GPT-NeoX-20B a hundred arithmetic questions

#45
post #12

Arithmetic seems like an example where it would help to learn from the real world, not just from text. I learnt to add up by watching my teacher manipulate plastic Lego-style blocks. Put 3 blocks with 2 blocks, and you have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

But somewhere in that massive corpus of text will be a description just like you've just given...

[deleted]

Re: I asked GPT-NeoX-20B a hundred arithmetic questions

#46
Hmmm. Some quick observation: on especially large 9-ish digit numbers, when it make very few digits correct, the correct ones are mostly including the very first and very last digits. Something remarkably similar to how us humans remember numbers and words: when we make mistake we generally remember first and last digits/letters but mess up the middle.

Re: I asked GPT-NeoX-20B a hundred arithmetic questions

#47

A really intelligent AI would just use a calculator.

I'd really want to see in a super complicated AI, given many questions, devising a way to compile a basic calculator program that obeys the simple math rules (e.g only addition and multiplication) for itself inline and calculate the thrown questions using that instead of training math data.

Re: I asked GPT-NeoX-20B a hundred arithmetic questions

#48

This just shows that this model did not learn anything. Humans do not see billions of examples to add numbers. We see just few and can apply learned notation and procedures to infinity with 100% precision. GPT-3 learned mathematical intuition. Humans can hardly learn multiplication table over months and repetitions of same examples, and that table hardly matters at all. GPT-3 is just plainly wrong objective they tryi…

I think you're completely wrong. This shows that the model learned a lot about at-a-glance math. Sure if you sit down with pen and paper you can get the answer, but few people could do these reliably in their head. But what you can do is figure the order of magnitude, and get a rough answer for the first few digits and last digits, each with their chance of being wrong. If anything, this shows that it learned math deeper than any normal computer calculator.

Re: I asked GPT-NeoX-20B a hundred arithmetic questions

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But somewhere in that massive corpus of text will be a description just like you've just given...

Sure, but GPT-3 doesn't attach semantics to text, it just learns how to produce text patterns that are similar to text patterns it has seen before.

"Similar" is an inherently semantic property.

Re: I asked GPT-NeoX-20B a hundred arithmetic questions

#50

If you want to play with the model, you can (with difficulty) for free at https://goose.ai/playground . You have to log in, but thankfully you can via google. The playground crashes every minute, and the defaults ruin your outputs (temperature 1, really? 0.7 to 0.8 is a necessity, with top-k 40), and they turned off autocorrect on mobile, presumably because they hate you and your family for owning an iPad, but you ca…

Thanks for that. I've played around a little bit.

> What is 123456789 - 123456789?

> 123456788

> What is 123456789 * 0?

> 123456789

Not even near.

It didn't surprise me that the model failed to handle cases above, which are unlikely to present in the data set.

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