Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

torchma t1_jccg5ej wrote

Reply to comment by Jackdaw99 in Exam results for recently released GPT 4 compared to GPT 3.5 by balancetheuniverse

Because basic calculation is already a solved problem. OpenAI is concerned with pushing the frontiers of AI, not with trivial integration of current systems. No one is going to use GPT for basic calculation anyways. People already have ubiquitous access to basic calculators. It's not part of GPT's core competency, so why waste time on it? What is part of GPT's core competency is an advanced ability to process language.

That's not to say that they are necessarily ignoring the math problem. But the approach you are suggesting is not an AI-based approach. You are suggesting a programmatic approach (i.e. "if this, then do this..."). If they were only concerned with turning ChatGPT into a basic calculator, that might work. But that's a dead-end. If OpenAI is addressing the math problem, they would be taking an AI approach to it (developing a model that learns math on its own). That's a much harder problem, but one with much greater returns from solving it.

1

Jackdaw99 t1_jcclxlr wrote

If they're going to release it and people are going to use it (whatever the warnings may be), I don't think it's trivial at all. Basic math factors into a significant percentage of the conversations we have. And it's certainly not trivial to be able to tell when a question needs it.

I'm not calling for it to be turned into a basic calculator: I'm asking why they don't recognize that a portion of the answers they provide will be useless without being able to solve simple math problems.

They could certainly build in a calculator now and continue to explore ways for it to learn math on its own. I just don't understand why you would release a project that gets so much wrong that could easily be made right. (And nothing I've read on it, which is a non-trivial amount, mentions that it can't (always) calculate basic arithmetic.) If I can't count on the thing to know for sure the answer to a basic division problem, I can't count on it at all -- at which point, there's no reason to use it.

0

torchma t1_jccsuru wrote

>I'm asking why they don't recognize that a portion of the answers they provide will be useless without being able to solve simple math problems.

?? They absolutely recognize that it's not good at math. It's not meant to be good at math. If you're still using it for math despite being told it's not good for math and despite the obvious results showing it's not good at math, then that's your problem, not theirs. That it's not good at math hardly negates its core competencies, which are remarkable and highly valuable.

>They could certainly build in a calculator now

What? That would be absolutely pointless. They might as well just tell you to use your own calculator. In fact, that's what Bing Chat would tell people if you asked it to do a math problem back before they neutered it.

2