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Brainstorming rare diseases and making diagnosis and providing treatment using medical science are different things. If I ask GPT4 about some arcane math conce

Brainstorming rare diseases and making diagnosis and providing treatment using medical science are different things. If I ask GPT4 about some arcane math concept it’ll wax lyrical about how it has connections to 20 other areas of math. But it fails at simple arithmetic.

gpm 3y ago
Proof based higher math and being good at calculating the answers to arithmetical formulas are two pretty unrelated things that just happen to both be called "math". One of my better math professors in a very good pure math undergraduate program added 7 + 9 and got 15 during a lecture, that really doesn't say anything about his ability as a mathematician though.
- jimsimmons 3y ago
  That’s sorta my point: diagnosing well studied diseases and providing precise treatment is different from speculating causes for rare diseases. Who knows, OP could be a paint sniffer and that’s their root issue. Brainstorming these things requires creativity and even hallucination. But that’s not what doctors do.
- bloqs 3y ago
  I thought all math was similar due to the ability to work with it requiring decent working memory. Both mental math and conceptually complex items from theory require excellent working memory, which is a function of IQ
  - dinosaurdynasty 3y ago
    You still have to practice arithmetic to be good at it, and a lot of mathematicians don't
jquery 3y ago
Most humans fail at doing simple arithmetic in their head. At the very least I'd say GPT4 is superior to 99% of people at mental math. And because it can explain its work step by step it's easy to find where the flaw in its reasoning is and fix it. GPT-4 is capable of self-correction with the right prompts in my experience.
PartiallyTyped 3y ago
> But it fails at simple arithmetic. Does it though? When allowing LLMs to use their outputs as a form of state they can very much succeed up to 14 digits with > 99.9% accuracy, and it goes up to 18 without deteriorating significantly [1]. That really isn't a good argument because you are asking it to do one-shot something that 99.999% of humans can't. https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.09066 https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.09066
- amelius 3y ago
  What do you mean one-shot? Hasn't ChatGPT been trained on hundreds of maths textbooks?
  - PartiallyTyped 3y ago
    When I ask a human to do 13 digit addition, 99.999% of them will do the addition in steps, and almost nobody will immediately blurt out an answer that is also correct without doing intermediate steps in their head. Addition requires carries, and we start from least to most significant and calculate with the carries. That is what 1-shot refers to. If allow LLMs to do the same instead of producing the output in a single textual response, then they will do just fine according to the cited paper. Average humans can do multiplication in 1 step for small numbers because they have memorized the tables. So can LLMs. Humans need multiple steps for addition, and so do LLMs.
    - amelius 3y ago
      Ok. In the context of AI, 1-shot generally means that the system was trained only on 1 example (or few examples). Regarding of the number of steps it takes an LLM to get the right answer: isn't it more important that it gets the right answer, since LLMs are faster than humans anyway?
      - PartiallyTyped 3y ago
        I am well aware what it means, and I used 1-shot for the same reason we humans say I gave it "a shot", meaning attempt. LLMs get the right answer and do so faster than humans. The only real limitation here is the back and forth because of the chat interface and implementation. Ultimately, it all boils down to giving prompts that achieve the same thing as shown in the paper. Furthermore, this is a weird boundary/goal-post humans get stuff wrong all the time, and we created tools to make our lives easier, if we let LLMs use tools, they do even better.
BurningFrog 3y ago
Being bad at arithmetic and making diagnoses are entirely separate things. If that's your best argument, you don't have an argument.
- hwillis 3y ago
  You're completely wrong- look at the wikipedia page for differential diagnosis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_diagnosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_diagnosis Literally the majority of the page is basic arithmetic, mostly Bayes. Diagnosis is a process of determining (sometimes quantitative, sometimes qualitative) the relative incidences of different diseases and all the possible ways they can present. Could this be X rare virus, or is it Y common virus presenting atypically?
slashdev 3y ago
LLMs are not for doing arithmetic. Don’t use a hammer to drive screws.
- jimsimmons 3y ago
  It’s an irregularity in their performance profile. Arithmetic is a known issue. How many such irregularities exist but are not measurable?
  - hedora 3y ago
    They are terrible at synthesizing knowledge. If a search engine result says water is wet, they’ll tell you about it. If not, then we should consider all the issues around water and wetness, but note that water is a great candidate for wetting things, though it is important to remember that it has severe limitations with respect to wetting things, and, at all costs some other alternatives should be considered, including list of paragraphs about tangential buzzwords such as buckets and watering cans go here.
  - tough 3y ago
    is arithmetic based on language? should an LLM be expected to handle one plus one ad infinitum? Makes no sense since it's not built for it
    - hwillis 3y ago
      Why does this apply for math but not for being a doctor?? It can do basic math, but you say that of course it can't do math- math isn't language. The fact that it can do some basic diagnosis does not mean it's good at doctor things or even that its better than webmd.
      - slashdev 3y ago
        Despite the article, I don’t think it would be a good doctor. I read a report of a doctor who tried it on his case files from the ER (I’m sure it was here in HN) It called some of the cases correctly, missed a few others, and would have killed one woman. I’m sure it has its place, but use a real doctor if your symptoms are in any way concerning.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
> If I ask GPT4 about some arcane math concept it’ll wax lyrical about how it has connections to 20 other areas of math. But it fails at simple arithmetic. The only reason failing at basic arithmetic indicates something when discussing a human is because you can reasonably expect any human to be first taught arithmetic in school. Otherwise, those things are hardly related. Now, LLMs don't go to school.

gpm 3y ago

Proof based higher math and being good at calculating the answers to arithmetical formulas are two pretty unrelated things that just happen to both be called "math". One of my better math professors in a very good pure math undergraduate program added 7 + 9 and got 15 during a lecture, that really doesn't say anything about his ability as a mathematician though.

jimsimmons 3y ago
That’s sorta my point: diagnosing well studied diseases and providing precise treatment is different from speculating causes for rare diseases. Who knows, OP could be a paint sniffer and that’s their root issue. Brainstorming these things requires creativity and even hallucination. But that’s not what doctors do.
bloqs 3y ago
I thought all math was similar due to the ability to work with it requiring decent working memory. Both mental math and conceptually complex items from theory require excellent working memory, which is a function of IQ
- dinosaurdynasty 3y ago
  You still have to practice arithmetic to be good at it, and a lot of mathematicians don't

jquery 3y ago

Most humans fail at doing simple arithmetic in their head. At the very least I'd say GPT4 is superior to 99% of people at mental math. And because it can explain its work step by step it's easy to find where the flaw in its reasoning is and fix it. GPT-4 is capable of self-correction with the right prompts in my experience.

PartiallyTyped 3y ago

> But it fails at simple arithmetic. Does it though? When allowing LLMs to use their outputs as a form of state they can very much succeed up to 14 digits with > 99.9% accuracy, and it goes up to 18 without deteriorating significantly [1]. That really isn't a good argument because you are asking it to do one-shot something that 99.999% of humans can't. https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.09066 https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.09066

amelius 3y ago
What do you mean one-shot? Hasn't ChatGPT been trained on hundreds of maths textbooks?
- PartiallyTyped 3y ago
  When I ask a human to do 13 digit addition, 99.999% of them will do the addition in steps, and almost nobody will immediately blurt out an answer that is also correct without doing intermediate steps in their head. Addition requires carries, and we start from least to most significant and calculate with the carries. That is what 1-shot refers to. If allow LLMs to do the same instead of producing the output in a single textual response, then they will do just fine according to the cited paper. Average humans can do multiplication in 1 step for small numbers because they have memorized the tables. So can LLMs. Humans need multiple steps for addition, and so do LLMs.
  - amelius 3y ago
    Ok. In the context of AI, 1-shot generally means that the system was trained only on 1 example (or few examples). Regarding of the number of steps it takes an LLM to get the right answer: isn't it more important that it gets the right answer, since LLMs are faster than humans anyway?
    - PartiallyTyped 3y ago
      I am well aware what it means, and I used 1-shot for the same reason we humans say I gave it "a shot", meaning attempt. LLMs get the right answer and do so faster than humans. The only real limitation here is the back and forth because of the chat interface and implementation. Ultimately, it all boils down to giving prompts that achieve the same thing as shown in the paper. Furthermore, this is a weird boundary/goal-post humans get stuff wrong all the time, and we created tools to make our lives easier, if we let LLMs use tools, they do even better.

BurningFrog 3y ago

Being bad at arithmetic and making diagnoses are entirely separate things. If that's your best argument, you don't have an argument.

hwillis 3y ago
You're completely wrong- look at the wikipedia page for differential diagnosis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_diagnosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_diagnosis Literally the majority of the page is basic arithmetic, mostly Bayes. Diagnosis is a process of determining (sometimes quantitative, sometimes qualitative) the relative incidences of different diseases and all the possible ways they can present. Could this be X rare virus, or is it Y common virus presenting atypically?

slashdev 3y ago

LLMs are not for doing arithmetic. Don’t use a hammer to drive screws.

jimsimmons 3y ago
It’s an irregularity in their performance profile. Arithmetic is a known issue. How many such irregularities exist but are not measurable?
- hedora 3y ago
  They are terrible at synthesizing knowledge. If a search engine result says water is wet, they’ll tell you about it. If not, then we should consider all the issues around water and wetness, but note that water is a great candidate for wetting things, though it is important to remember that it has severe limitations with respect to wetting things, and, at all costs some other alternatives should be considered, including list of paragraphs about tangential buzzwords such as buckets and watering cans go here.
- tough 3y ago
  is arithmetic based on language? should an LLM be expected to handle one plus one ad infinitum? Makes no sense since it's not built for it
  - hwillis 3y ago
    Why does this apply for math but not for being a doctor?? It can do basic math, but you say that of course it can't do math- math isn't language. The fact that it can do some basic diagnosis does not mean it's good at doctor things or even that its better than webmd.
    - slashdev 3y ago
      Despite the article, I don’t think it would be a good doctor. I read a report of a doctor who tried it on his case files from the ER (I’m sure it was here in HN) It called some of the cases correctly, missed a few others, and would have killed one woman. I’m sure it has its place, but use a real doctor if your symptoms are in any way concerning.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

> If I ask GPT4 about some arcane math concept it’ll wax lyrical about how it has connections to 20 other areas of math. But it fails at simple arithmetic. The only reason failing at basic arithmetic indicates something when discussing a human is because you can reasonably expect any human to be first taught arithmetic in school. Otherwise, those things are hardly related. Now, LLMs don't go to school.