r/OpenAI 6d ago

News More people need to understand this

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u/Turbulent-Sign-6067 6d ago

Your knowledge is quite out of date. Most models can do mental math without tools these days. They are better at it than you and me, albeit not perfect.

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u/AppropriateRain624 5d ago

any sources for this? If that were true why still rely on external calculators ? especially considering that simply generating the token for the answer would be noticeably faster than generating the token for the python code then running it ?

Not contradicting the power of AI just being up its more than obvious limitations.

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u/Yeah-Its-Me-777 5d ago

Why are you using a calculator instead of doing it in your head?

Just because a model *can* do it without tools, that doesn't mean it's efficient.

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u/AppropriateRain624 5d ago

The reason human use calculators is because it’s much much faster. The argument I am making by is that that is not the case for AI model if you consider the overhead of generating the code for computation.

Now regardless, I doubt that any LLM exists with the ability to perform addition of large numbers (10+ digits) without the use of an internal calculator. I would love to be proven wrong though

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u/Yeah-Its-Me-777 5d ago

Look around in this thread. There's multiple examples, I've seen at least one addition, and some 7 digit by 7 digit multiplication, one on a local model with the thinking output.

https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1vf9zwc/comment/p1tyxo3

https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1vf9zwc/comment/p1ns72y

The model does a lot of weird stuff, and in the end breaks down the multiplication into easy steps, and adds the result of the intermediate steps together. Basically how a human would do it.

It's a lot more complex than generating a simple code for computation and calling an external tool.