5 ms·
Since LLMs can't do arithmetic, one has to think there's more going on, at least in the arithmetic part of the brain, than is going on in LLMs.
by throwaway8503 3y ago
Since LLMs can't do arithmetic, one has to think there's more going on, at least in the arithmetic part of the brain, than is going on in LLMs.
- ravenstine 3y agoDunno if there's some trickery going on under the hood, but GPT-4 does basic arithmetic correctly.
- krainboltgreene 3y agoIt statistically outputs the next probable value of text. There is a lot of math related text in the CommonCrawl (likely the biggest source of it's training). That is all the company who owns it claims that it does. There is no calculation, therefor no basic arithmetic being done correctly.
- jackmott42 3y agoemergent behavior does happen with neural networks. It is correct to say that GPT 4 doesn't do math correctly, but it may be incorrect to say a large language model can't in principle.
- roflyear 3y agoIs there any evidence it can? It's not incorrect to say there is no God for example
- kgeist 3y agoIf it's only statistics, what is the neural network for?
- kgwgk 3y agoImplement the probabilistic model of token sequences and fit it to the training data? You could say the same for a character recognition system.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- famouswaffles 3y agoIt's extremely easy to test arithmetic on random numbers it'll never have seen in the training set. GPT-4 can do arithmetic just fine.
- ResearchCode 3y agoAnd it will give you some random number with maybe the right order of magnitude. Doesn't seem to do arithmetic very fine at all actually.
- famouswaffles 3y agoYeah that's not true lol. It's arithmetic is not perfect (mostly multiplication, addition is fine) but there's nothing random about even the wrong/non-exact numbers
- krainboltgreene 3y agowe're talking about an llm dude how am i supposed to have a conversation about someone who is gassing up "not perfect [arithmetic]" (something a wrist watch from the 80's can do) and won't even believe what the creators of said machine say about how it works
- throwaway8503 3y agoThis is what I got on ChatGPT today. I assume it used GPT4: Prompt ChatGPT Actual Match 397,356 * 930,547 369,685,207,932 369,758,433,732 FALSE 36,330 * 26,951 979,458,630 979,129,830 FALSE 8,681 * 9,330 80,911,430 80,993,730 FALSE 278 * 903 250,734 251,034 FALSE 82 * 77 6,314 6,314 TRUE Edit: # of correct digits (counting from leftmost) only exceeds 3 on the smallest pair. It drops to two, as well, on the 3x3 set.
- optimalsolver 3y agoUnless you're using Plus (black icon), you're using GPT-3.5 (green icon).
- ogogmad 3y agoYou probably used GPT-3.5. That said, I didn't manage to get GPT-4 to calculate 36,330 * 26,951 correctly. I suggested casting out 9s, casting out 11s, doing long multiplication, reversing the digits - nothing. I have a theory that it does arithmetic badly because the logic goes right-to-left, when LLMs write left-to-right. If the digits were to be reversed, it might not make as many mistakes. I ran out of attempts before I could test this properly.
- IX-103 3y agoDid you adjust the prompt to ask it how a famous mathematician would answer the question? Or what a calculator would say the answer is? Sometimes LLMs get math wrong because people got math wrong on the training data and so they match the error frequency (https://learnprompting.org/docs/basics/roles https://learnprompting.org/docs/basics/roles).
- roflyear 3y agoYes that's exactly what people are saying here. It's not a criticism of the tool it's an example of what the tool is and how it functions.
- deleted 3y ago
- runarberg 3y agoExcellent observation. In fact the language part of the brain is only a (albeit a rather large) portion of the brain (not nearly as large as visual processing though). And people who suffer brain damage which renders them unable to speak (or understand speech; which interestingly is a different portion; albeit close to each other) are still able to demonstrate intelligent behavior with ease. In fact it is damage to the prefrontal cortex (which has nothing to do with speech) which is mostly correlated with a detriment in intelligent behavior (suspiciously also social behavior; a food for though in what we consider “intelligence”). Victims of lobotomy had their prefrontal cortex destroyed, and their injuries resulted in them loosing their personalities and loosing basic function as human beings, even though they were still able (but perhaps not always willing) to speak and comprehend speech.
- jameshart 3y agoI don’t think you have an ‘arithmetic’ part of your brain. What you have that LLMs lack is a visual part of your brain - one which can instantly count quantities of objects up to about 7. That gives you tools that can be trained to do basic arithmetic operations. Although you have to be taught how to use that natural capability in your brain to solve arithmetic problems. And of course for more complex things than simple arithmetic, you fall back on verbalized reasoning and association of facts (like multiplication tables) - which an LLM is capable of doing too. Poor GPT though has only a one dimensional perceptual space - tokens and their embedding from start to end of its attention window - although who’s to say it doesn’t have some sense for ‘quantity’ of repeated patterns in that space too?
- 77pt77 3y agoOne should think these things are disembodied politicians. That has been my best analogy so far. They'll never say I don't know and bullshit you into oblivion while never backtracking.