Love or hate just please explain why. This isn’t my area of expertise so I’d love to hear your opinions, especially if you’re particularly well versed or involved. If you have any literature, studies or websites let me know.

  • Elting@piefed.social
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    4 days ago

    They literally can’t do pure math. Like everyone knows how bad they are at even simple math. We have had tools that do pure math for thousands of years, and we call them calculators. A hotbox for an imaginative mathematician? Sure, but any conclusions drawn get drawn elsewhere with more traditional tools.

    • queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone
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      4 days ago

      I hear this criticism of LLMs all the time and I just don’t get it. They’re language models, they take language inputs and produce language outputs. They aren’t designed to do math. It’s like complaining that a reciprocating saw can’t do math.

      • Elting@piefed.social
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        2 days ago

        Wouldn’t bear repeating if so many people didn’t think it has calculator functionality. Maybe if the people who designed them were honest about what they have made rather than trying to sell it to investors as AGI.

        • queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone
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          2 days ago

          Maybe this is reflective of my media bubble, but I’ve never encountered someone claiming that LLMs should be used as calculators. Most of the advertising I’ve seen (not much) is mostly centered around natural language search and image recognition. I only really hear about them being bad at math from detractors, and I think it misses the mark of why AI companies are dangerous. The problem with LLMs is not that they’re bad at math, or even that they get non-math answers wrong sometimes. The problem is when they’re controlled by humans with a political axe to grind, who deliberately wish to obscure or distort the information their users can access, c.f. Grok.

    • theherk@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      There is active research right now for their use in pure maths. I don’t think it is primarily about direct solutions, but in program synthesis for formal logic. Keep in mind this isn’t just LLM’s, but also graph networks and other non-transformer networks.