Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that it’s a neat demo, but it’s not all that useful in itself. You could also do this by writing a function in a programming language (if it weren’t built in), to arbitrary accuracy, and it doesn’t cost anything to run. A more practical thing to do for algorithms is probably to use ChatGPT to help you write the function you need.
The significance of the paper is moreso the implications of how far ICL can take you rather than the ease/viability of the solution proposed. Sure there are better methods for arithmetic but arithmetic is extremely quantifiable with rigid steps. What happens when you step out of that kind of domain ? Like the above blog. or Code documentation. For example, you can paste new documentation in a gpt-4 instance and it wi…
You can't do it for everything, but if you can generate code and run it outside the LLM, you should.