Can we trust LLM CALCULATIONS?.
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Ok, you have a moderately complex math problem you needed to solve. You gave the problem to 6 LLMS all paid versions. All 6 get the same numbers. Would you trust the answer?
How trustable the answer is depends on knowing where the answers come from, which is unknowable. If the probability of the answers being generated from the original problem are high because it occurred in many different places in the training data, then maybe it's correct. Or maybe everyone who came up with the answer is wrong in the same way and that's why there is so much correlation. Or perhaps the probability match is simply because lots of math problems tend towards similar answers.
The core issue is that the LLM is not thinking or reasoning about the problem itself, so trusting it with anything is more assuming the likelihood of it being right more than wrong is high. In some areas this is safe to do, in others it's a terrible assumption to make.
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But, if you ran, gave the problem to all the top models and got the same? Is it still likely an incorrect answer? I checked 6. I checked a bunch of times. Different accounts. I was testing it. I'm seeing if its possible with all that in others opinions I actually had to check over a hundred times each got the same numbers.
They could get the right answer 9999 times out of 10000 and that one wrong answer is enough to make all the correct answers suspect.
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You cannot trust LLMs. Period.
They are literally hallucination machines that just happen to be correct sometimes.
So are most people.
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If the LLMs are part of a modern framework I would expect that they should be calling out to Wolfram Alpha (or a similar specialized math-solver) via an API to get the answer for you, for that matter.
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I'm a little confused after listening to a podcast with.... Damn I can't remember his name. He's English. They call him the godfather of AI. A pioneer.
Well, he believes that gpt 2-4 were major breakthroughs in artificial infection. He specifically said chat gpt is intelligent. That some type of reasoning is taking place. The end of humanity could come in a year to 50 years away. If the fella who imagined a Neural net that is mapped using the human brain. And this man says it is doing much more. Who should I listen too?. He didn't say hidden AI. HE SAID CHAT GPT. HONESTLY ON OFFENSE. I JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND THIS EPIC SCENARIO ON ONE SIDE AND TOTALLY NOTHING ON THE OTHER
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What if there is a popular joke that relies on bad math that happens to be your question. Then the alignment is understandable and no indication of accuracy. Why use a tool with known issues, and overhead like querying six, instead of using a decent tool like Wolfram alpha?
I did dozens of times. Same calculations.
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I'm a little confused after listening to a podcast with.... Damn I can't remember his name. He's English. They call him the godfather of AI. A pioneer.
Well, he believes that gpt 2-4 were major breakthroughs in artificial infection. He specifically said chat gpt is intelligent. That some type of reasoning is taking place. The end of humanity could come in a year to 50 years away. If the fella who imagined a Neural net that is mapped using the human brain. And this man says it is doing much more. Who should I listen too?. He didn't say hidden AI. HE SAID CHAT GPT. HONESTLY ON OFFENSE. I JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND THIS EPIC SCENARIO ON ONE SIDE AND TOTALLY NOTHING ON THE OTHER
Anyone with a stake in the development of AI is lying to you about how good models are and how soon they will be able to do X.
They have to be lying because the truth is that LLMs are terrible. They can't reason at all. When they perform well on benchmarks its because every benchmark contains questions that are in the LLMs training data. If you burn trillions of dollars and have nothing to show, you lie so people keep giving you money.
https://arxiv.org/html/2502.14318
However, the extent of this progress is frequently exaggerated based on appeals to rapid increases in performance on various benchmarks. I have argued that these benchmarks are of limited value for measuring LLM progress because of problems of models being over-fit to the benchmarks, lack real-world relevance of test items, and inadequate validation for whether the benchmarks predict general cognitive performance. Conversely, evidence from adversarial tasks and interpretability research indicates that LLMs consistently fail to learn the underlying structure of the tasks they are trained on, instead relying on complex statistical associations and heuristics which enable good performance on test benchmarks but generalise poorly to many real-world tasks.
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It checked out. But, all six getting the same is likely incorrect?.
If all 6 got the same answer multiple times, then that means that your query very strongly correlated with that reply in the training data used by all of them. Does that mean it's therefore correct? Well, no. It could mean that there were a bunch of incorrect examples of your query they used to come up with that answer. It could mean that the examples it's working from seem to follow a pattern that your problem fits into, but the correct answer doesn't actually fit that seemingly obvious pattern. And yes, there's a decent chance it could actually be correct. The problem is that the only way to eliminate those other still also likely possibilities is to actually do the problem, at which point asking the LLM accomplished nothing.
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I'm a little confused after listening to a podcast with.... Damn I can't remember his name. He's English. They call him the godfather of AI. A pioneer.
Well, he believes that gpt 2-4 were major breakthroughs in artificial infection. He specifically said chat gpt is intelligent. That some type of reasoning is taking place. The end of humanity could come in a year to 50 years away. If the fella who imagined a Neural net that is mapped using the human brain. And this man says it is doing much more. Who should I listen too?. He didn't say hidden AI. HE SAID CHAT GPT. HONESTLY ON OFFENSE. I JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND THIS EPIC SCENARIO ON ONE SIDE AND TOTALLY NOTHING ON THE OTHER
One step might be to try and understand the basic principles behind what makes a LLM function. The Youtube channel 3blue1brown has at least one good video on transformers and how they work, and perhaps that will help you understand that "reasoning" is a very broad term that doesn't necessarily mean thinking. What is going on inside a LLM is fascinating and amazing in what does manage to come out that's useful, but like any tool it can't be used for everything well, if at all.
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I'll ask AI what's really going on lolool.
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If all 6 got the same answer multiple times, then that means that your query very strongly correlated with that reply in the training data used by all of them. Does that mean it's therefore correct? Well, no. It could mean that there were a bunch of incorrect examples of your query they used to come up with that answer. It could mean that the examples it's working from seem to follow a pattern that your problem fits into, but the correct answer doesn't actually fit that seemingly obvious pattern. And yes, there's a decent chance it could actually be correct. The problem is that the only way to eliminate those other still also likely possibilities is to actually do the problem, at which point asking the LLM accomplished nothing.
I think the best thing at this juncture is to ask an LLM WHAT THE TRUTH IS LOL
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I'll ask AI what's really going on lolool.
Funny, but also not a bad idea, as you can ask it to clarify on things as you go. I just reference that YT channel because he has a great ability to visually show things to help them make sense.
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Ok, you have a moderately complex math problem you needed to solve. You gave the problem to 6 LLMS all paid versions. All 6 get the same numbers. Would you trust the answer?
no, LLM's are designed to drive up user engagement nothing else, it's programmed to present what you want to hear not actual facts. plus it's straight up not designed to do math
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The whole "two r's in strawberry" thing is enough of an argument for me. If things like that happen at such a low level, its completely impossible that it wont make mistakes with problems that are exponentially more complicated than that.
The problem with that is that it isn't actually counting the R's.
You'd probably have better luck asking it to write a script for you that returns the number of instances of a letter in a string of text, then getting it to explain to you how to get it running and how it works. You'd get the answer that way, and also then have a script that could count almost any character and text of almost any size.
That's much more complicated, impressive, and useful, imo.
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LLMs don't and can't do math. They don't calculate anything, that's just not how they work. Instead, they do this:
2 + 2 =? What comes after that? Oh, I remember! It's '4'!It could be right, it could be wrong. If there's enough pattern in the training data, it could remember the correct answer. Otherwise it'll just place a plausible looking value there (behavior known as AI hallucination). So, you can not "trust" it.
Every LLM answer is a hallucination.
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Ok, you have a moderately complex math problem you needed to solve. You gave the problem to 6 LLMS all paid versions. All 6 get the same numbers. Would you trust the answer?
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Ok, you have a moderately complex math problem you needed to solve. You gave the problem to 6 LLMS all paid versions. All 6 get the same numbers. Would you trust the answer?
Maybe? I'd be looking all over for some convergent way to fuck it up, though.
If it's just one model or the answers are only close, lol no.
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Every LLM answer is a hallucination.
Some are just realistic to the point of being correct. It frightens me how many users have no idea about any of that.
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short answer: no.
Long Answer: They are still (mostly) statisics based and can't do real math. You can use the answers from LLMs as starting point, but you have to rigerously verify the answers they give.
A calculator as a tool to a llm though, that works, at least mostly, and could be better when kinks get worked out.
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Finally an intelligent comment. So many comments in here that don't realize most LLM's are bundled with calculators that just do the math.
