>Of course people who actually know how ChatGPT works don't expect it to be able to magically solve mathematical problems. However, these examples do show that

>Of course people who actually know how ChatGPT works don't expect it to be able to magically solve mathematical problems. However, these examples do show that ChatGPT isn't (contrary to some of the hype) deriving a deep conceptual understanding of its input data. I don't think it really makes the case that you think it makes. Humans learn language and concepts through sentences, and in most cases semantic understanding can be built up just fine this way. It doesn't work quite the same way for math. When I look at the numbers in the example, I have no idea if they are prime or factors because they themselves don't have much semantic content. In order to understand whether they are those things or not actually requires to stop and perform some specific analysis on them learned through internalizing sets of rules that were acquired through a specialized learning process. Humans themselves don't learn math by just talking to one another about it, rather they actually have to do it in order to internalize it. I suspect it's simply a case of we haven't sent ChatGPT to highschool yet. There will be some particular trick in terms of training methodology that trains the network to perform that more specialized analysis that doesn't simply emerge out of 'predict the next token from all this random internet text' as it's likely severely underrepresented in the training data in the first place, but I think it ought to be perfectly possible.