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I find it amusing that, at present, ChatGPT seems to be lousy at mathematical-type reasoning while being very good at natural language use. That is the opposite

I find it amusing that, at present, ChatGPT seems to be lousy at mathematical-type reasoning while being very good at natural language use. That is the opposite of what many people, including me, have come to expect of computers. I have worked for many years in translation, lexicography, and language education, and I am flabbergasted at how well ChatGPT handles natural language. It can produce example sentences of polysemous words as well as or better than an experienced dictionary editor (i.e., me) [1], and it can correctly guess the meanings of unknown words from very limited context [2]. Teaching an adult human to use a second language without making grammatical mistakes is nearly impossible, and native speakers often make mistakes as well. In a week of testing, I have yet to see ChatGPT make any grammatical mistakes in either English or Japanese. Like many native speakers, however, it is often not able to explain its grammatical instincts correctly [3]. [1] https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/dictionarydefinitions.html https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/dictionarydefinitio... [2] https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/unknownwords.html https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/unknownwords.html [3] https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/explaininggrammar.html https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/explaininggrammar.h...

freediver 4y ago
ChatGPT is a natural language model, meaning it has been trained on vast amounts of text and thus is good at processing and outputting text back. To it, numbers follow the rules of language, and not math, unlike for example a dedicated calculator app. Only thanks to seeing numbers in vast amount of text it was trained on, it is able to do common math relatively well, and anything uncommon very poorly.
- zarzavat 4y ago
  As pointed out by Yannic[0], ChatGPT is actually a source code model first, then they trained natural language model on top of that. Source code is still language but it has more math in it. But the truth is we don’t know. I personally wouldn’t be surprised if they do train it on a whole bunch of calculator output to boost its numerical reasoning. [0] https://youtu.be/0A8ljAkdFtg https://youtu.be/0A8ljAkdFtg 7:21
  - joe_the_user 4y ago
    Could you include a link that isn't a video that leaves my eyes and ears bleeding? Plus from the video: "do you have a thorough idea what OpenAI is doing, neither do I" - cut to strobe light and rock music. Jeesh, can't see that as support.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      It's just a guy talking. > Plus from the video: "do you have a thorough idea what OpenAI is doing, neither do I" - cut to strobe light and rock music. Jeesh, can't see that as support. The hell are you talking about? There's no strobe there, he just goes to a slide with a white background, and the music is very quiet compared to his voice and not at all something I would call "rock".
      - ivanche 4y ago
        > It's just a guy talking. Maybe joe_the_user went overboard with calling it strobe light, but this is definitely not "just a guy talking". I don't know how people call this style of videos but it's very tiresome - constantly zooming in and out, full of sound effects (glass breaking, snaring, what not), changing backgrounds, changing lights, everything is just uncontrollably moving and shaking every 5-10 seconds or so.
        Dylan16807 4y ago
        The sound effects are not loud though, and you don't have to look at the video to get the information. Some zooms aren't the kind of visual where "eyes bleeding" is a hyperbole of the actual problem, either. There are valid criticisms that can be made, but they are different from the criticisms joe_the_user actually made.
        zarzavat 4y ago
        The special effects are done as a parody, as you might be able to tell from the fact that his background is a green screen with nothing on it. His usual viewers will be familiar with his “ML news” videos where the parody is way more in-your-face. His usual style of video is a rather dry screen capture of him annotating a PDF, so I guess he does it for some lighthearted relief.
- Telemakhos 4y ago
  This will sound trite, but I wonder whether there's a lesson here to be learned about human education. We put a great deal of effort into educating our children in language and math, to the extent that those form the major branches of our standardized testing for college admissions tests (where they are still used). We treat them as separate subjects, perhaps for good reason, as we also do science and geography and art and music. Can ChatGPT's successes and shortcomings give us insight into how we should or should not educate our own progeny?
  - abitnegative 4y ago
    Are you asking if we should just teach kids language and hope that they learn math, science, geography, art, and music as a side effect?
  - tkgally 4y ago
    That doesn’t sound trite to me at all. ChatGTP raises major issues for the future of education in many areas, and discussions about how to deal with them have just begun.
    - 2devnull 4y ago
      It will obsolete essay writing or make cheating more of a problem. This may be good. Multiple choice tests will be favored over things like term papers, which are basically meaningless as of now. This will favor general intelligence (iq) at least until there are interface advances like supposedly neurolink or wearables, at which point iq will matter less and big five traits much more. That would be beautiful in many ways, but a major inflection point for humans; no more elites. A great leveling may reduce violence and oppression, and increase prosperity across the globe.
  - ForHackernews 4y ago
    I doubt it. Humans are not ML models, and AI "neural networks" are not that much like a brain. I guess it can get philosophical quickly, but people are very quick to read too much into a fancy text-generation tool. We talk about it "learning" but it can't really learn anything, because it is not an entity with agency. It takes an input and responds with an output. I'm not saying it's not impressive, but it is manifestly nothing like a mind.
lumost 4y ago
It’s a tokenization problem. ChatGPT understands that twenty two is two + twenty. It does not understand that 22 = 20+2. If can do math by hand using rules it knows until it spits out a numeral form - then it errors.
mjsweet 4y ago
I have found the same. I was asking it yesterday about calculating rental yields for our rental property. Usually it understands the context from the whole thread, but I found myself repeating myself a lot when asking new questions about possible scenarios. This is at odds with how well it knows the aws-cli, ffmpeg and yt-dlp… and bash. My productivity at the command prompt has skyrocketed… but it really flounders with doing financial calculations.
- Morgawr 4y ago
  I would recommend not using it to do any kind of even simple calculations. It's VERY bad at it but what is dangerous is that it makes the answer look subtly plausible. I've tried to use it to calculate averages between 10 or so numbers and every time I ask it the same exact question I get an "average" number back that looks plausible but is slightly different every time. Then I whip out the calculator and measure it myself and it's an answer that ChatGPT never gave me. It's *really* dangerous to use this to do any kind of important calculations like financial stuff.
  - ivanche 4y ago
    I find it ironic that it can generate function which calculates average of an array of numbers in dozen programming languages, but it can't tell you the average when you ask it to.
nojvek 4y ago
There’s multiple papers from google, nvidia and probably others that interface large language models to a Python repl, physics engines, math engines and then train the model to output code, take the output and then form the answer. The model accuracy jumps by double digit percentages. Right now we’ve just seen ChatGPT make sense of text tokens, once it deeply integrates with internet/other models/traditional compute it’s going to be superhuman in many areas. Also slightly scary if it’s not aligned with human values.
seszett 4y ago
> I have yet to see ChatGPT make any grammatical mistakes in either English or Japanese. In French, I have seen it make the same conjugation mistakes as native speakers ("elle a terminée") as well as a few gender mistakes on conjugation (not sure which one exactly anymore, but something like "le lutin est tombée") which wouldn't be common for native speakers. But it is very good, I have been using it to translate Dutch children's songs into French and that works great, it's quite lousy at counting syllables but very good at finding equivalents for expressions that are not directly translatable. It can even invent words when asked to, a friend has been struggling to find a good translation for Lovecraft's "night-gaunts" for some time (the traditional translation is "maigres bêtes de la nuit" which is good, but didn't really work for poetry as it's much longer) and ChatGPT was able to suggest portmanteau words that were interesting, and other rather good neologisms that looked like regular French words, based on two Greek or Latin words.
- tkgally 4y ago
  What is your impression of ChatGPT’s responses in French compared to its responses in English? While I haven’t noticed any grammatical mistakes in its Japanese, its Japanese responses seem less lucid and more repetitive than its English. It seems likely that it was trained on more data in English than in other languages, possibly making its English responses better. I don’t know any other languages well enough to judge with confidence, though.
  - seszett 4y ago
    I have found it very good at French, I didn't really notice any difference compared to English. Dutch seems good too but I might not be able to judge.
  - _ache_ 4y ago
    In French, ChatGPT sounds very natural yet a little formal. I didn't found any mistake but sometime the form of the verb seems unusual but correct.
- bartimus 4y ago
  You can also ask it to translate phonetically for a specified alphabet. Have it say things sarcastically. And then have it capitalize certain words to emphasize the sarcasm.
infinitezest 4y ago
> I find it amusing that, at present, ChatGPT seems to be lousy at mathematical-type reasoning while being very good at natural language use. All this time developers have been freaking out about ChatGPT taking their jobs when it's really politicians that should be nervous!
- tkgally 4y ago
  Or politicians’ speechwriters! Inspired by your comment, I tried three versions of a moderately long prompt beginning with “Write a five paragraph speech by an American politician at the opening ceremony of a new bridge [sewage treatment plant, seawall along the ocean]. Begin with a self-deprecating joke. Then thank the fine people of the city....” I put the results here: https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/speeches.html https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/speeches.html If you were to put the names of the bridge, city, etc. into the speeches at appropriate places, I don’t think anyone would guess that the speeches were machine-written.
- 2devnull 4y ago
  A bright future lies in harnessing these language models and other types of ai in computational public policy. For example, humans can’t easily read and understand these massive bills that are written by our legislature.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Morgawr 4y ago
> In a week of testing, I have yet to see ChatGPT make any grammatical mistakes in either English or Japanese. I've seen it make mistakes in Japanese in the very first prompt I gave it (which also answered incorrectly)[0]. I don't know why people are convinced ChatGPT is good with languages, I've been trying stuff with Japanese and most of the time it's just incredibly wrong to the point of being counterproductive to anyone who's trying to learn the language or practice translation. What it is good at is approximating human language in a fluent-looking manner (which is incredibly impressive, I agree with you on that), but it's TOO GOOD at bullshitting its way through most explanations to the point where it will look natural and fluent in a different language if you're not very skilled at it or a native speaker and I've seen people who are very fluent in Japanese get tricked into believing some Japanese wordsoup that was spat out by ChatGPT. I'm impressed by the technology, I'm scared by the legion of people who will just blindly trust this garbage, honestly. [0] - https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/189601264424714241/1049494191635431434/image.png https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/189601264424714241/10... (note なさいのだ is nonsense both grammatically and logically)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tkgally 4y ago
  Let me clarify: I have not seen ChatGPT make any grammatical mistakes in its use of Japanese in continuous Japanese-only text. Like you, I have seen it make mistakes in explanations of grammar, both about Japanese and about English, as well as in its translations between the two languages. Its explicit knowledge of grammar seems much worse than its productive grammatical ability. If you spot any productive Japanese mistakes by ChatGPT, let me know. The About page of my website, which is linked from my profile page, has my e-mail address. I see from your site that we share an interest in the Japanese language. I would be happy to hear from you.
fock 4y ago
It's very good at talking something. But the something is ... well: how many people here think that carpooling with friends to go to a nature preserver is a good idea for a first date?

freediver 4y ago

ChatGPT is a natural language model, meaning it has been trained on vast amounts of text and thus is good at processing and outputting text back. To it, numbers follow the rules of language, and not math, unlike for example a dedicated calculator app. Only thanks to seeing numbers in vast amount of text it was trained on, it is able to do common math relatively well, and anything uncommon very poorly.

zarzavat 4y ago
As pointed out by Yannic[0], ChatGPT is actually a source code model first, then they trained natural language model on top of that. Source code is still language but it has more math in it. But the truth is we don’t know. I personally wouldn’t be surprised if they do train it on a whole bunch of calculator output to boost its numerical reasoning. [0] https://youtu.be/0A8ljAkdFtg https://youtu.be/0A8ljAkdFtg 7:21
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  Could you include a link that isn't a video that leaves my eyes and ears bleeding? Plus from the video: "do you have a thorough idea what OpenAI is doing, neither do I" - cut to strobe light and rock music. Jeesh, can't see that as support.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    It's just a guy talking. > Plus from the video: "do you have a thorough idea what OpenAI is doing, neither do I" - cut to strobe light and rock music. Jeesh, can't see that as support. The hell are you talking about? There's no strobe there, he just goes to a slide with a white background, and the music is very quiet compared to his voice and not at all something I would call "rock".
    - ivanche 4y ago
      > It's just a guy talking. Maybe joe_the_user went overboard with calling it strobe light, but this is definitely not "just a guy talking". I don't know how people call this style of videos but it's very tiresome - constantly zooming in and out, full of sound effects (glass breaking, snaring, what not), changing backgrounds, changing lights, everything is just uncontrollably moving and shaking every 5-10 seconds or so.
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        The sound effects are not loud though, and you don't have to look at the video to get the information. Some zooms aren't the kind of visual where "eyes bleeding" is a hyperbole of the actual problem, either. There are valid criticisms that can be made, but they are different from the criticisms joe_the_user actually made.
      - zarzavat 4y ago
        The special effects are done as a parody, as you might be able to tell from the fact that his background is a green screen with nothing on it. His usual viewers will be familiar with his “ML news” videos where the parody is way more in-your-face. His usual style of video is a rather dry screen capture of him annotating a PDF, so I guess he does it for some lighthearted relief.
Telemakhos 4y ago
This will sound trite, but I wonder whether there's a lesson here to be learned about human education. We put a great deal of effort into educating our children in language and math, to the extent that those form the major branches of our standardized testing for college admissions tests (where they are still used). We treat them as separate subjects, perhaps for good reason, as we also do science and geography and art and music. Can ChatGPT's successes and shortcomings give us insight into how we should or should not educate our own progeny?
- abitnegative 4y ago
  Are you asking if we should just teach kids language and hope that they learn math, science, geography, art, and music as a side effect?
- tkgally 4y ago
  That doesn’t sound trite to me at all. ChatGTP raises major issues for the future of education in many areas, and discussions about how to deal with them have just begun.
  - 2devnull 4y ago
    It will obsolete essay writing or make cheating more of a problem. This may be good. Multiple choice tests will be favored over things like term papers, which are basically meaningless as of now. This will favor general intelligence (iq) at least until there are interface advances like supposedly neurolink or wearables, at which point iq will matter less and big five traits much more. That would be beautiful in many ways, but a major inflection point for humans; no more elites. A great leveling may reduce violence and oppression, and increase prosperity across the globe.
- ForHackernews 4y ago
  I doubt it. Humans are not ML models, and AI "neural networks" are not that much like a brain. I guess it can get philosophical quickly, but people are very quick to read too much into a fancy text-generation tool. We talk about it "learning" but it can't really learn anything, because it is not an entity with agency. It takes an input and responds with an output. I'm not saying it's not impressive, but it is manifestly nothing like a mind.

lumost 4y ago

It’s a tokenization problem. ChatGPT understands that twenty two is two + twenty. It does not understand that 22 = 20+2. If can do math by hand using rules it knows until it spits out a numeral form - then it errors.

mjsweet 4y ago

I have found the same. I was asking it yesterday about calculating rental yields for our rental property. Usually it understands the context from the whole thread, but I found myself repeating myself a lot when asking new questions about possible scenarios. This is at odds with how well it knows the aws-cli, ffmpeg and yt-dlp… and bash. My productivity at the command prompt has skyrocketed… but it really flounders with doing financial calculations.

Morgawr 4y ago
I would recommend not using it to do any kind of even simple calculations. It's VERY bad at it but what is dangerous is that it makes the answer look subtly plausible. I've tried to use it to calculate averages between 10 or so numbers and every time I ask it the same exact question I get an "average" number back that looks plausible but is slightly different every time. Then I whip out the calculator and measure it myself and it's an answer that ChatGPT never gave me. It's *really* dangerous to use this to do any kind of important calculations like financial stuff.
- ivanche 4y ago
  I find it ironic that it can generate function which calculates average of an array of numbers in dozen programming languages, but it can't tell you the average when you ask it to.

nojvek 4y ago

There’s multiple papers from google, nvidia and probably others that interface large language models to a Python repl, physics engines, math engines and then train the model to output code, take the output and then form the answer. The model accuracy jumps by double digit percentages. Right now we’ve just seen ChatGPT make sense of text tokens, once it deeply integrates with internet/other models/traditional compute it’s going to be superhuman in many areas. Also slightly scary if it’s not aligned with human values.

seszett 4y ago

> I have yet to see ChatGPT make any grammatical mistakes in either English or Japanese. In French, I have seen it make the same conjugation mistakes as native speakers ("elle a terminée") as well as a few gender mistakes on conjugation (not sure which one exactly anymore, but something like "le lutin est tombée") which wouldn't be common for native speakers. But it is very good, I have been using it to translate Dutch children's songs into French and that works great, it's quite lousy at counting syllables but very good at finding equivalents for expressions that are not directly translatable. It can even invent words when asked to, a friend has been struggling to find a good translation for Lovecraft's "night-gaunts" for some time (the traditional translation is "maigres bêtes de la nuit" which is good, but didn't really work for poetry as it's much longer) and ChatGPT was able to suggest portmanteau words that were interesting, and other rather good neologisms that looked like regular French words, based on two Greek or Latin words.

tkgally 4y ago
What is your impression of ChatGPT’s responses in French compared to its responses in English? While I haven’t noticed any grammatical mistakes in its Japanese, its Japanese responses seem less lucid and more repetitive than its English. It seems likely that it was trained on more data in English than in other languages, possibly making its English responses better. I don’t know any other languages well enough to judge with confidence, though.
- seszett 4y ago
  I have found it very good at French, I didn't really notice any difference compared to English. Dutch seems good too but I might not be able to judge.
- _ache_ 4y ago
  In French, ChatGPT sounds very natural yet a little formal. I didn't found any mistake but sometime the form of the verb seems unusual but correct.
bartimus 4y ago
You can also ask it to translate phonetically for a specified alphabet. Have it say things sarcastically. And then have it capitalize certain words to emphasize the sarcasm.

infinitezest 4y ago

> I find it amusing that, at present, ChatGPT seems to be lousy at mathematical-type reasoning while being very good at natural language use. All this time developers have been freaking out about ChatGPT taking their jobs when it's really politicians that should be nervous!

tkgally 4y ago
Or politicians’ speechwriters! Inspired by your comment, I tried three versions of a moderately long prompt beginning with “Write a five paragraph speech by an American politician at the opening ceremony of a new bridge [sewage treatment plant, seawall along the ocean]. Begin with a self-deprecating joke. Then thank the fine people of the city....” I put the results here: https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/speeches.html https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/speeches.html If you were to put the names of the bridge, city, etc. into the speeches at appropriate places, I don’t think anyone would guess that the speeches were machine-written.
2devnull 4y ago
A bright future lies in harnessing these language models and other types of ai in computational public policy. For example, humans can’t easily read and understand these massive bills that are written by our legislature.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Morgawr 4y ago

> In a week of testing, I have yet to see ChatGPT make any grammatical mistakes in either English or Japanese. I've seen it make mistakes in Japanese in the very first prompt I gave it (which also answered incorrectly)[0]. I don't know why people are convinced ChatGPT is good with languages, I've been trying stuff with Japanese and most of the time it's just incredibly wrong to the point of being counterproductive to anyone who's trying to learn the language or practice translation. What it is good at is approximating human language in a fluent-looking manner (which is incredibly impressive, I agree with you on that), but it's TOO GOOD at bullshitting its way through most explanations to the point where it will look natural and fluent in a different language if you're not very skilled at it or a native speaker and I've seen people who are very fluent in Japanese get tricked into believing some Japanese wordsoup that was spat out by ChatGPT. I'm impressed by the technology, I'm scared by the legion of people who will just blindly trust this garbage, honestly. [0] - https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/189601264424714241/1049494191635431434/image.png https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/189601264424714241/10... (note なさいのだ is nonsense both grammatically and logically)

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tkgally 4y ago
Let me clarify: I have not seen ChatGPT make any grammatical mistakes in its use of Japanese in continuous Japanese-only text. Like you, I have seen it make mistakes in explanations of grammar, both about Japanese and about English, as well as in its translations between the two languages. Its explicit knowledge of grammar seems much worse than its productive grammatical ability. If you spot any productive Japanese mistakes by ChatGPT, let me know. The About page of my website, which is linked from my profile page, has my e-mail address. I see from your site that we share an interest in the Japanese language. I would be happy to hear from you.

fock 4y ago

It's very good at talking something. But the something is ... well: how many people here think that carpooling with friends to go to a nature preserver is a good idea for a first date?