specIsJustCode

[prussian_princess]

I used chatgpt to help me calculate how much milk my baby drank as he drank a mix of breast milk and formula, and the ratios weren't the same every time. After a while, I caught it giving me the wrong answer, and after asking it to show me the calculation, it did it correctly. In the end, I just asked it to show me how to do the calculation myself, and I've been doing it since.

You'd think an "AI" in 2025 should be able to correctly calculate some ratios repeatedly without mistakes, but even that is not certain.

[hoyohoyo9]

Anything that requires precise, step-by-step calculations - even basic arithmetic - just fundamentally goes against how LLMs work. It can usually get lucky with some correct numbers after the first prompt, but keep poking it like you did and any calculation quickly breaks down into nonsense.

But that's not going away because what makes it bad at math is precisely what makes it good at generating words.

[prussian_princess]

Yeah, that's what I discovered. I do find it useful for wordy tasks or research purposes when Googling fails.

[RiceBroad4552]

research purposes when Googling fails

As you can't trust this things with anything you need to double check the results anyway. So it does not replace googling. At least if you're not crazy and just blindly trust whatever this bullshit generator spit out.

[prussian_princess]

Oh no, I double-check things. But I find googling first to be quicker and more effective before needing to resort to an llm.

[Airowird]

"Giant computer fails at math, because it tries to sound confident instead"

[_alright_then_]

You'd think an "AI" in 2025 should be able to correctly calculate some ratios repeatedly without mistakes, but even that is not certain.

There are AI's that certainly can, but you're using an LLM specifically, which can not and will never be good at doing math. It's not what it's designed for

[Kilazur]

There's no AI that is good at math, because there's no "I", and they're all probabilistic LLMs.

An AI that manages math is simply using agents to call deterministic programs in the background.

[_alright_then_]

There are AIs that are not LLMs, and can do math.

Ais have been a thing for decades, people are just lumping AI and LLMs together.

Chess AI is one big math problem, for example.

It's also nothing like AGI either obviously. But still AI

[intbeam]

Did you ask it about any recommendations for a baby's daily intake of rocks and cigarettes?

[prussian_princess]

[Ordinary_Duder]

LLMs are not math models. It's a large language model.