I do think it's interesting to think about why the LLM needs to be told to ask for a calculator and when to do that. And not just in individual prompts where hu

I do think it's interesting to think about why the LLM needs to be told to ask for a calculator and when to do that. And not just in individual prompts where humans manually prompt ask it to "write some code to find the answer" but in general. We often use the colloquial definition of training to mean something to the effect of taking an input, attempting an output, and being told whether that output was right or wrong. LLMs extend that to taking a character or syllable token as input, doing some computation, predicting the next token(s), and seeing if that was right or wrong. I'd expect the training data to have enough content to memorize single-digit multiplication, but I'd expect it to also learn that this model doesn't work for multiplying an 11 digit number by a 14 digit number. The "use a calculator" concept and "look it up in a table" concepts were taught to the LLM too late and it didn't internalize that as a way to perform better.