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ArcticWinterZzZ t1_jdt0urg wrote

Reply to comment by Ok_Faithlessness4197 in Why is maths so hard for LLMs? by RadioFreeAmerika

I don't think that's impossible to add. You are right: chain of thought prompting circumvents this issue. I am specifically referring to "mental math" multiplication, which GPT-4 will often attempt.

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liqui_date_me t1_jdt531o wrote

You would think that GPT would have discovered a general purpose way to multiply numbers, but it really hasn’t, and it isn’t accurate even with chain-of-thought prompting.

I just asked GPT4 to solve this: 87176363 times 198364

The right answer should be 17292652070132 according to wolfram alpha.

According to GPT4 the answer is 17,309,868,626,012.

This is the prompt I used:

What is 87176363 times 198364? Think of the problem step by step and give me an exact answer.

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ArcticWinterZzZ t1_jdtlkru wrote

Even if it were to perform the addition manually, addition takes place in the opposite order that GPT-4 thinks. It's unlikely to be very good at it.

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