4 ms·
> GPT-4 is pretty good at Math, nowhere near "falling apart". its good at tasks which were included into training dataset in some variations.
by riku_iki 3y ago
> GPT-4 is pretty good at Math, nowhere near "falling apart".
its good at tasks which were included into training dataset in some variations.
- PaulHoule 3y agoKinda able to do some math tasks some of the time whereas you can use techniques from the arithmetic textbook to get the right answer all of the time with millions of times less CPU even including the overhead of round-tripping to ASCII numerals which is shockingly large compared to what a multiply costs. Kinda "the problem" with LLMS is that they successfully seduce people by seeming to get the right answer to anything 80% of the time.
- famouswaffles 3y agoMath is a lot more than just Arithmetic.
- PaulHoule 3y agoYeah but if you can only do arithmetic right X% of the time you aren't going to get other answers right as often as would really be useful. That said, LLMs have a magic ability to "short circuit" and get the right answer despite not being able to get the steps right. I remember scoping out designs for NLP systems about 5 years ago and frequently conclude that "that won't work" because information was lost at an early stage but in retrospect by short circuiting a system like that can outperform its parts but it still faces a ceiling on how accurate the answers are because the reasoning is not sound.
- btilly 3y agoHuman reasoning is amazingly not sound. When you add in various patterns, double-checks, and memorized previous results, what human reasoning can do is astounding. But it is very, vary far from sound.
- riku_iki 3y agoall currently available reasoning approaches are limited. I guess the topic is how far GPT in reasoning is from human. We can take some simple tests: - can GPT play chess as well as humans, as benchmark of reasoning games? - did GPT prove some nontrivial math theorems or solve some math problems where humans couldn't find solution yet?
- PaulHoule 3y agoOne thing I thought was amusing was that there was a burst of articles about Cyc that got mentioned when Doug Lenat died including this arXiv paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04445 https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04445 and that one said that Cyc had over 1,100 special purpose reasoning engines. The general purpose resolution solver was nowhere near fast enough to be really useful. Early one there was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Problem_Solver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Problem_Solver which would be capable in principle of finding a winning move in a chess position but because it worked by exhaustive search it would practically take too long. The thing is that a good chess playing program is not generally intelligent just as a chess grandmaster isn't necessarily good at anything other than chess, it just has special purpose heuristics (as opposed to algorithms) that find good chess move. ChatGPT-like systems will be greatly improved by coupling them to other systems such as "write a Python/SQL script then run it", "run a query against bing and summarize the results", and "go find the chess engine and ask it what move to make", that is, like Cyc, it will get a swiss army knife of tools that help it do things it's not good at but it doesn't create general intelligence any more than Cyc did. Robert Penrose in the Emperor's New Mind suggests that there must be some quantum magic in the human mind because the human mind is able to solve any math problem whereas any machine is limited by Gödel's theorem. It's silly, however, because we don't humans are capable of proving any theorem: look at how we struggled with Fermat for nearly 360 years or how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture seems not even tantalizingly out of reach. The difference might be that humans feel bad when they get the wrong answer whereas ChatGPT certainly doesn't. (as much as its empty apology can be satisifying to people) This isn't just an attribute of humans, working with other animals such as horses I'm convinced that they feel bad when they screw up too.
- sdenton4 3y agoThe arithmetic issues are well documented and understood; it's a problem of sub-token manipulation, which has nothing to do with reasoning. (Similar to calling blind people unintelligent because they can't read the iq test.) And the better llms can easily write code to do the attention that they suck at...
- bigyikes 3y agoExcellent anology. LLMs are capable of many extraordinary things, and it’s a shame people dismiss them because they fail to live up to some specific test they invented.
- Nevermark 3y agoI have played around with GPT-4 and some fairly simple but completely new math ideas. It was fabulous at identifying special cases I overlooked, that disproved conjectures.
- sudokuist 3y agoExample?
- Nevermark 3y agoI was playing around with prime numbers, and simple made up relationships between them, such as between the square of a prime N vs. the set of primes smaller than N, etc. It caught me out with specific examples that violated my conjectures. In one case the conjecture held for all but one case, another conjecture was generally true but not for 2 and 3. In one case it thought a conjecture I made was wrong, and I had to push it to think through why it thought it was wrong until it realized the conjecture was right. As soon as it had its epiphany, it corrected all its logic around that concept. It was very simple stuff, but an interesting exercise. The part I enjoyed the most was seeing GPT-4's understanding move and change as we pushed back on each other's views. You miss out on that impressive aspect of GPT-4 in simpler sessions.
- sudokuist 3y agoHave you tried formalizing your ideas with Isabelle? It has a constraint solver and will often find counterexamples to false arithmetical propositions[1]. 1: https://isabelle.in.tum.de/overview.html https://isabelle.in.tum.de/overview.html
- famouswaffles 3y agoNo it's just pretty good in general lol.
- cerved 3y agomy experience is that it's pretty subpar
- astrange 3y agoAre you using code interpreter? It's better. The mobile app doesn't offer it though, and also has a system prompt that causes some strange behavior - sometimes it will put emojis in the text and then apologize for using emojis.
- bigyikes 3y agoCare to share a GPT conversation you’ve had? I’m interested in what sorts of prompts lead you to this opinion. My experience is the opposite.
- cerved 3y agoA bit too much of a hassle. But if you're willing to share some of your good experiences, I'm curious