alt Hacker NewsThat's a bit of an uncharitable summary. In bases 8, 12, 16, 24 and 32 their model achieved 99.7% accuracy. They would never expect it to achieve 100% accuracy. It would be like if you trained a model to predict whether or not a given number is prime. A model that was 100% accurate would defy mathematical knowledge but a model that was 99.7% would certainly be impressive.
In this case, they prove that the model works by categorising inputs into a number of binary classes which just happen to be very good predictors for this otherwise random seeming sequence. I don't know whether or not some of these binary classes are new to mathematics but either way, their technique does show that transformer models can be helpful in uncovering mathematical patterns even in functions that are not continuous.
A pocket calculator that would give the right numbers 99.7% of the time would be fairly useless. The lack of determinism is a problem and there is nothing 'uncharitable' about that interpretation. It is definitely impressive, but it is fundamentally broken, because when you start making chains of things that are 99.7% correct you end up with garbage after very few iterations. That's precisely why digital computers won out over analog ones, the fact that they are deterministic.