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ChatGPT: Can't calculate even basic math. Is it getting dumber?

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Re: ChatGPT: Can't calculate even basic math. Is it getting dumber?

#11

Post by napbree »

tootie wrote: post #4

AFAIK, ChatGPT doesn't ever attempt to do math. It's not a generalized AI. It's building novel blocks of text based on its enormous corpus of sources. That corpus includes technical information, but doesn't actually understand how anything works or unwinds any algorithms. It would scan its body of text for similar division problems and extrapolate an answer from a purely lexical point of view. It's dumb, but also the…

Well, if you physically ask it "Can you do math", it states that it can - maybe purely from a hypothetical perspective and not actual calculations.

"Yes, I can do math. I am a large language model trained by OpenAI, so I have a lot of knowledge about many different topics, including math. Is there a specific math problem you would like me to help you with?"

Of course you can read that many ways and I think you're right in it means it can regurgitate the theory but not the answers.

Re: ChatGPT: Can't calculate even basic math. Is it getting dumber?

#13

Post by hnbad »

baal80spam wrote: post #8
tootie wrote: post #4

AFAIK, ChatGPT doesn't ever attempt to do math. It's not a generalized AI. It's building novel blocks of text based on its enormous corpus of sources. That corpus includes technical information, but doesn't actually understand how anything works or unwinds any algorithms. It would scan its body of text for similar division problems and extrapolate an answer from a purely lexical point of view. It's dumb, but also the…

> but doesn't actually understand how anything works I'm struggling to comprehend how an AI could ever truly achieve this.

Nobody knows. As I understand it so far the primary approach has been to just throw more data at it and tweak it until the output is good enough.

The forest being missed here for the trees is that specialized AI is probably a much better solution to most problems unless your problem is literally replacing humans.

Re: ChatGPT: Can't calculate even basic math. Is it getting dumber?

#14

Post by chomp »

I think there’s a misunderstanding in how chatgpt works. You feed it text, and it outputs what it considers to be a statistically plausible answer. The reason you got that specific answer is because first it tokenizes your string into 2-3 character chunks, and then from its training, it understands that some portion or combination of those tokens produce an answer similar to that, so it believes 0.02002715164 is statistically plausible in response. It doesn’t understand anything more than weights and biases, so it can’t math, only text.

Re: ChatGPT: Can't calculate even basic math. Is it getting dumber?

#15

Post by hnbad »

hnbad wrote: post #9

I don't think it's getting worse, you're just becoming more aware of its limitations. It's not a knowledge engine. It's a machine learning application with a language model. It "knows" what the answers should look like and it can infer the correct answer from context some of the time but it doesn't actually know any facts and can't reason about them. That's also not what it was designed for. People fawning over its s…

I think part of the reason AI is so attractive to VC money that previously went into crypto is that while the "cynical" sales pitch of crypto is selling unregulated financial products to retail investors in a legal gray area, the one for AI is abdicating direct responsibility by introducing a convoluted rube goldberg machine in the decision making process: there is a reason EU legislation for example grants residents the right to demand human review and justification for any automated decision (e.g. on insurance claims).

If you think this is a stretch consider that most "gig economy" VC money went to companies whose value proposition mostly consisted of skirting labor laws and other regulations (e.g. Airbnb opening residential space to tourism, Uber sidestepping Taxi regulations, delivery apps offloading liability to "independent" drivers, etc). "Disruption" to a large part often also refers to laws and regulations. Illegality (i.e. violating laws and regulations) only becomes a problem if you get caught and the consequences outweigh the profit.

Re: ChatGPT: Can't calculate even basic math. Is it getting dumber?

#16

Post by boredemployee »

hcabral wrote: post #6

I think you can always teach it a little bit, since for the chat session it holds "memory". So maybe adding/saying some basic algebra inputs it would output better or accurate results.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems it is not holding memory anymore, at least for some prompts it says something like "I don't know what my previous answer was so I hope I'm not repeating it"

Re: ChatGPT: Can't calculate even basic math. Is it getting dumber?

#18

Post by ratg13 »

jstx1 wrote: post #5

Not just math, it doesn't grasp some simple language concepts. I was asking it to generate some project names for a hobby database project - it suggested stuff like "DataStore", "ValueVault" etc. Okay, that's a good start, then I asked it to give me name suggestions that aren't made by combining two existing words, and it couldn't get what I was asking for even after I rephrased it a few times, it just kept combining…

Asking a machine to make up nonsense words, and hoping you would get something that a human would think is clever is a big ask.

I think there is too much hype in the media that have set your expectations too high.

It’s an interactive language model and you are attempting to force it to not use language or variables.

Re: ChatGPT: Can't calculate even basic math. Is it getting dumber?

#19

Post by frodetb »

My friend shared some screenshots of ChatGPT giving a convincing response to the prompt

    > Outline a proof of the snake lemma
Satisfied with the output, my friend then asked it to outline a proof of the Riemann hypothesis, and rather than being tricked into gibberish maths jargon or miraculously producing such a proof, ChatGPT accurately and briefly summarized the hypothesis, explained some limitations of current knowledge and paths such a proof might take. It did a better job at it than I would have.

Because of these examples, even though they are examples of mathematics rather than computation, I don't think it's fair to be so dismissive. It's a bit of a well known fun fact that a lot of professional mathematicians are terrible at mental arithmetic.

Re: ChatGPT: Can't calculate even basic math. Is it getting dumber?

#20

Post by soco »

chomp wrote: post #14

I think there’s a misunderstanding in how chatgpt works. You feed it text, and it outputs what it considers to be a statistically plausible answer. The reason you got that specific answer is because first it tokenizes your string into 2-3 character chunks, and then from its training, it understands that some portion or combination of those tokens produce an answer similar to that, so it believes 0.02002715164 is stat…

There's this same misunderstanding everywhere and I'm afraid the more AI gets into business, the more troubles we will suffer from that. The AI - as it looks today - doesn't even aim to be correct, just appropriate. So like here it will happily feed you quick but incorrect answers, and the problems will start when business decision makers will happily use those answers because hey it's AI.
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