Comment by bcherny - Hacker Neue

bcherny Aug 5, 2023 parent

I mean, I don’t know the square root of 232444232 off the top of my head either..

sarchertech Aug 5, 2023

So you'd either work it out and check that it was right. Or you'd tell the person asking that you didn't know. You wouldn't just make a plausible answer and confidently state it. If you did that frequently, people would stop listening to you.

pixl97 Aug 5, 2023

What does the word approximately mean, if we go back to the previous statement answer from GTP 4, and what precision is needed in the answer?

And, no I'd grab a damned calculator and let the specialized tool do the work, which it turns out if you turn on plugin mode GPT-4 can use the same tools and get an exact answer.

sarchertech Aug 5, 2023

That number isn’t correct to any precision and the fact that there wasn’t rounded to the nearest 10, 100 etc… means that no human would recognize it as an approximation to anything but the nearest whole number (which it wasn’t).

>calculator

Well in this case you don’t have access to a calculator because there was no plugin. And you likely wouldn’t just make up a number like chatgpt did.

This perfectly illustrates the danger of chatgpt. It will confidently make up an answer to any question whether or not it has access to specialized tools in a way that most humans won’t.

eis Aug 5, 2023

One difference is that you are aware that you can't do it and state so. Our current LLMs will just give whatever result they think it should be. It might be correct, it might be off by a bit or it might be completely wrong and there's no way for the user to tell apart from double checking with some non-LLM source wich kinda defeats the purpose of asking the LLM in the first place.

blibble Aug 5, 2023

if you've had a high school education presumably you could work it out

it can't

jacquesm Aug 5, 2023

I can. Newtons method is pretty easy to do in your head, but with larger numbers you need to be very careful not to mess it up. But on paper it's trivial.

sillysaurusx Aug 5, 2023

In other words, you need an external tool (paper) which GPT doesn’t have.

jacquesm Aug 5, 2023

No, I actually can, just not for arbitrarily large numbers. And 'paper' is just temp storage, not a tool. A tool in this case would be a sliderule or a calculator or an abacus. Long division requires pen and paper too if you want to 'show your work', just like I would have to show on paper how I did the square root of say 47515, you could simply choose not to believe me if I spat out the answer, but if I showed you step-by-step on paper and you followed every step you would either also conclude that it is correct, or alternatively that I had made a mistake.

That's why I think it is significant that chatgpt gets the addition spot on but gives a wrong answer to the square root problem. I can do better than that off the top of my head and I do not have access to the same computational resources that it has.

kortilla Aug 5, 2023

Yes, GPT has access to memory.

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