alt Hacker NewsOk I don't really care either way but to play devil's advocate, what exactly is this specific challenge of adding numbers with a transformer model demonstrating/advancing? The pushpack from people, albeit a little aggressive, does have a grain of truth. We're demonstrating that a model which uses preexisting addition instructions can add numbers? I mean yeah you can do it with arbitrarily few parameters because you don't need a machine learning model at all. Not exactly groundbreaking so I reckon the debate is fair.
Now if you said this proof of addition opens up some other interesting avenue of research, sure.
>what exactly is this specific challenge of adding numbers with a transformer model demonstrating/advancing?
Well for starters, it puts the lie to the argument that a transformer can only output examples it has seen before. Performing the calculation on examples that haven't been seen demonstrates generalisation of the principles and not regurgitation.
While this misconception persists in a large number of people, counterexamples can always serve a useful purpose.