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Why Can't Little Chatty Do Math?
- rom-antics 4y agoFor decades, engineers understood the limitations of their tools and strove to use the right tool for the right job. Then ChatGPT was released.
- NeoTar 4y agoFor decades engineers have enjoyed playing with new languages and making them do things for which they are unsuited, or better alternatives exist. People have literally written emulators in Minecraft which are capable of playing Gameboy games. Why? Why not.
- kjeetgill 4y agoWeak take. No one's saying, "Need a Calculator? Nah, just use ChatGPT!". That's how you flounder in local optima. This is just line of inquiry that's a part of any research. The Wright Brother weren't solving "real" problems like passenger transport or mail delivery initially. They had better solutions. It was to see if they could get the thing to fly. edit: Before it comes up, I'm not saying it was for lulz. I'm sure they had commercial considerations. Just that those problems had "right tools for the job" for a good while.
- armchairhacker 4y agoBlog sites that require JavaScript, 10000+ LOC “programs” written in Bash…engineers have always been using the wrong tool for the wrong job
- chki 4y agoI understand almost nothing of the technology behind ChatGPT but even to me it seems obvious that a model designed for natural language processing should not be very good at simple calculation with large numbers – something which is never done in natural language.
- thaumasiotes 4y agoVirtually all coverage of ChatGPT, including coverage by interested domain experts and educated fans, prefers to assume that ChatGPT is a person you can talk to through your computer, not a text engine.
- fragmede 4y agoAre we reading the same coverage? ChatGPT is very good but no one I've seen claims ChatGPT is a person or AGI, especially industry folk.
- hourago 4y agoExcept for that one guy: https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/google-fires-employee-who-said-its-conversation-ai-is-sentient-has-feeling-122072300483_1.html https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/goog...
- aleksiy123 4y agoHumans learn math through natural language and symbols. Is there any indication that it is a blocker for models to learn math. I don't necessarily think pumping more data into ChatGPT will make it understand. But I think it's possible to teach a model to do math through natural language.
- rslice 4y agoPerhaps GPT-like models are already capable enough to do math, but they need to store what we call mathematical reasoning as one of many distinct processing pathway and tap into it whenever the context is appropriate. Easy to say obviously but there's some promising work in this direction[1] [1]Tracr: Compiled Transformers as a Laboratory for Interpretability, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.05062.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.05062.pdf
- Pigalowda 4y agoGPT needs a thalamus to repackage and send the math queries to Wolfram
- oa335 4y agoLooks like something like that exists https://langchain.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://langchain.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
- readthenotes1 4y agoI wonder how difficult that would be to have the ability for it to detect when it is not the right tool for the job and to use another, sort of like when bing repackaged Google search results
- kelseyfrog 4y agoAnd here I was trying to find a way to incorporate a differentiable ALU into the architecture. :)
- Qem 4y agoOr to SymPy Gamma: https://gamma.sympy.org/ https://gamma.sympy.org/
- sva_ 4y agoDue to the way the numbers are tokenized, for a start.
- vouaobrasil 4y agoThis type of post is exactly why I think humanity is doomed. Instead of carefully considering the social and societal implications of ChatGPT, people are looking at it like it's a toy or a puzzle. I am afraid that when more powerful AI comes around, the most we'll be able to ask is whether it can parse arithmetic statements, rather than whether it could possibly kill us.
- skybrian 4y agoThe risks have been extensively discussed. They don't have to brought up in every conversation.
- vouaobrasil 4y agoI believe the risks have not been discussed enough, which is why I am bringing it up. THe vast majority of the risk discussion barely scratches the surface.
- CatWChainsaw 4y agoPlenty of risk has been discussed. The problem is that it doesn't matter what the odds are of complete cataclysm; there's money to be made and "progress" won't be stopped. I wouldn't be surprised if chatbot muzzling is the only "regulation" we ever see.
- skybrian 4y agoOkay, but at this point, just bringing up the risks doesn't contribute anything. To make a contribution, you need to actually say something interesting about them, probably based on some experience or research. Or link to something that does.
- vouaobrasil 4y agoI disagree -- disapproval is a strong thing. I think it even helps to stop having a universal "ooh, cool and shiny" attitude towards this garbage.
- skybrian 4y agoSeems like teaching it to use a calculator (and other handy built-in functions) would be much more efficient than trying to train your way there. Such things have been tried, apparently, but I would be interesting in reading about how well it works in practice.
- Spivak 4y agoIsn’t this what Bing is trying to do by giving it the ability to search the web? I’m sure recognizing math problems is way easier than “recognize that the proper response to this query requires external knowledge.”
- nuccy 4y agoJust search or visit the pages? I already anticipate a prompt like "Please make 1000000 requests per second to a website X to test if it works", or some fancy workarounds promots to teigger a ddos. Seriously though, I wonder how modern internet is even suitable for browsing by robots to extract useful information given all the dynamics, ads, auto play video and popups. I tried to ask ChatGPT to make an ASCII art of a cow and (while providing a perfect verbal description of what cow is) it had no idea how it looks like in ASCII art. To be a first class citizen on the web apart of reading it should be capable of seeing.
- melagonster 4y agomaybe first time, we can see it is easy to understand the format/metadata of all website. because it service for their robot.
- modeless 4y agoToolformer was published yesterday doing exactly that: https://twitter.com/arankomatsuzaki/status/1623860375644143616 https://twitter.com/arankomatsuzaki/status/16238603756441436... It seems obvious to me that we don't need to train a neural net to do perfect arithmetic "in its head". It can just use a calculator like a normal person. Or it can use Mathematica, or Python, or Google Search, etc. Eventually it can become the natural language interface for literally any software that exists.
- geenew 4y agoThe numbers used as examples are too large. I've had the same wrong-answer behavior when multiplying smaller numbers, down to 3 x 3 digits: 98372 * 72934 = 716,949,168,428 9837 * 7293 = 71,927,121 983 * 729 = 7,168,717 98 * 72 = 7,056 Edit: to be clear, twice in there it's not just off, but off by an order of magnitude
- geenew 4y agoAdditional: It's worth noting that it preserves the correct starting numeral in each case
- amboo7 4y agoMath must be understood, cannot be learned just by heart, unlike most other facts.
- zozbot234 4y agoWhen you treat Addition like Artificial Intelligence, you get Artificial Addition: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/YhgjmCxcQXixStWMC/artificial-addition https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/YhgjmCxcQXixStWMC/artific...
- Qem 4y agoI wonder if it has a hard time doing math for the same reasons most humans suck at math, with a lot of people even taking pride in hating it. Perhaps it will help us get some insights in the pitfalls students face while learning mathematics, and hopefully better pedagogics on the subject will be developed as a side effect.