alt Hacker NewsI work in quantum computing. There is quite a lot of material about quantum computing out there that these LLMs must have been trained on. I have tried a few different ones, but they all start spouting nonsense about anything that is not super basic.
But maybe that is just me. I have read some of Terence Tao's transcripts, and the questions he asks LLMs are higher complexity than what I ask. Yet, he often gets reasonable answers. I don't yet know how I can get these tools to do better.
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"I don't yet know how I can get these tools to do better."
I have wondered if he has access to a better model than I, the way some people get promotional merchandise. A year or two ago he was saying the models were as good as an average math grad student when to me they were like a bad undergrad. In the current models I don't get solutions to new problems. I guess we could do some debugging and try prompting our models with this Erdos problem and see how far we get. (edit: Or maybe not; I guess LLMs search the web now.)
This was also my experience with certain algorithms in the realm of scheduling.
Which models did you try?
This often feels like an annoying question to ask, but what models were you using?
The difference between free ChatGPT, GPT-5.2 Thinking, and GPT-5.2 Pro is enormous for areas like logic and math. Often the answer to bad results is just to use a better model.
Additionally, sometimes when I get bad results I just ask the question again with a slightly rephrased prompt. Often this is enough to nudge the models in the right direction (and perhaps get a luckier response in the process). However, if you are just looking at a link to a chat transcript, this may not be clear.