alt Hacker NewsThat's not even the problem I encounter. They literally crap out on stupidly simple tasks. Recent ones:
1. Bing was gaslighting me into 9.11 being greater than 9.9
2. ChatGPT said that 7x7/7+7/7+7/7 was 24.
3. When expanding (x+1)^2 the output was 2x^2+2.
Regardless of any level of interpretation and irrelevant information if it can't deterministically understand correctness and the semantics of the operations in question then it's fucking useless.
What is worse in an educational context is that it is actively harmful.
Most average humans can’t do any of these things either. Try asking people on the street. Or in an average US college student.
For deterministic calculations you obviously want to allow LLMs to use tools to do math. Just like you’d want to allow humans to use calculators.
So yeah, you shouldn’t ask LLMs to do math just like you shouldn’t ask average people to do math. They both suck at it.