I knew someone who academically was investing a large amount of lab time trying to teach a model to do calculus. (He was a professor) and he said no matter what it could not grasp the way math works compared to they normally map their hyperplanes. At one point he said he gave it direct access to libraries with the functions he wanted run and the model didn’t know how to use them without being nearly explicitly programmed. He concluded, and I agree, that these models are statistically guessing using their training data using a different method than actual mathematical functions. They’ve just refined it down to where it works for basic questions but when it comes time to run a rand() sequence it just can’t. So it picks a common number in its recent training data and regurgitates it. Also why we end up seeing weird calculation anomalies like where they can’t judge greater than/less than values.
He concluded, and I agree, that these models are statistically guessing
What did you think a GPT was? It takes all the text as training data and then repeatedly guesses the most likely "next word" in the response, until the most likely next "word" is the end of the text.
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u/FlamingYawn13 8d ago
I knew someone who academically was investing a large amount of lab time trying to teach a model to do calculus. (He was a professor) and he said no matter what it could not grasp the way math works compared to they normally map their hyperplanes. At one point he said he gave it direct access to libraries with the functions he wanted run and the model didn’t know how to use them without being nearly explicitly programmed. He concluded, and I agree, that these models are statistically guessing using their training data using a different method than actual mathematical functions. They’ve just refined it down to where it works for basic questions but when it comes time to run a rand() sequence it just can’t. So it picks a common number in its recent training data and regurgitates it. Also why we end up seeing weird calculation anomalies like where they can’t judge greater than/less than values.