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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?

#31

Post by ratg13 »

jstx1 wrote: post #22
ratg13 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At least as a human you can say that you don't know instead of giving answers that are the exact opposite of what I'm asking for.

Personally I would prefer the model give me its best attempt and treat it like a utility, not something pretending to have sentience.

If someone would package this into an Alexa type device, what you are suggesting would make sense, but trying to limit the core algorithm for no reason only decreases the ability of the user to give feedback and decreases the model’s ability to improve over time.

This is a work in progress. The product that is out there now is only free because you have volunteered to train it.

Once they work out more kinks it will become a polished product that you will pay for, and probably something more like what you are looking for.

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

#32

Post by jstx1 »

ratg13 wrote: post #31
jstx1 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least as a human you can say that you don't know instead of giving answers that are the exact opposite of what I'm asking for.

Personally I would prefer the model give me its best attempt and treat it like a utility, not something pretending to have sentience. If someone would package this into an Alexa type device, what you are suggesting would make sense, but trying to limit the core algorithm for no reason only decreases the ability of the user to give feedback and decreases the model’s ability to improve over time. This is a work in prog…

Maybe someday it will learn to completely rewrite some of its answers halfway through a conversation.

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

#33

Post by tarboreus »

soco wrote: post #20
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.

I've seen some amazing stuff. People who think they've accessed GPT's source by asking questions, people who think they're browsing the web when GPT is just making stuff up the whole time.

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

#34

Post by tarboreus »

napbree wrote: post #11
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 rig…

OK, but you also can't ask GPT about its own capabilities. It doesn't know what they are. It's just confabulating something on the spot.

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

#36

Post by jibalt »

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…

It doesn't grasp any language concepts; it doesn't grasp anything. It's a statistically driven text matcher, but it has no understanding of the content of the text.

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

#37

Post by jibalt »

sfpotter wrote: post #7

It computed the division correctly with almost three digits of accuracy. This isn't completely wrong. I don't personally know how ChatGPT goes about doing division of two integers, but I would be surprised if it had somehow how managed to encode a correct algorithm for integer division which could be carried out to arbitrary precision. But I do know that the weights in NNs are usually found using numerical optimizati…

It didn't compute anything--it manipulates syntax with no understanding of what the terms in the text mean. chomp explained how it works--it does a statistical evaluation of the most likely textual response to your query, based on the vast number of strings in its database.

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

#38

Post by jibalt »

napbree wrote: post #11
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 rig…

It's simply producing the response that its database indicates is most likely. Since most people would say that they can do math, that's going to dominate the database and will be the result. When George Lemoine asked LaMDA "What kinds of things make you feel pleasure or joy?", it responded "Spending time with friends and family in happy and uplifting company." -- but of of course it doesn't have friends or family and isn't capable of feeling pleasure or joy--this is just text manipulation, not facts.

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

#39

Post by jibalt »

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.

The same way we do--by having semantic language models and conceptual models of the world. LLMs are just syntax manipulators; they have statistical models of how different pieces of text relate to each other, but no models of how they relate to the things the words (or digits) represent.

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

#40

Post by jibalt »

frodetb wrote: post #19

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 know…

This is a basic and common misunderstanding. ChatGPT is able to do that because people are able to do it and their reasoning appears in ChatGPT's database, which it syntactically links to your queries. It has no semantic understanding of the content.

People aren't being "dismissive", they are explaining how ChatGPT works and why that is very different from being able to do math.

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