I think it's a fascinating case study that LLMs are bad with numbers. It could have something to do with how these models are trained. Humans do a lot of rote m

I think it's a fascinating case study that LLMs are bad with numbers. It could have something to do with how these models are trained. Humans do a lot of rote memorization and learning in young life to cement numbers and basic math, but an LLM doesn't have this advantage—it's like a person that has just read a lot. If a human was never taught math, but read thousands of books, I wonder if their number skills would be in any way analogous to an LLM. Then again, I think there could be an argument that the human would pick up and internalize counting without any instruction, just based on the embodied fact of having (on average) ten fingers. I'm guessing there's a cog-sci or anthropological study that looks into this…