Comment by saghm
4 years ago
> How much of this is just "AI is bad at everything", but in the math case, it's easier for the lay person to tell
Honestly, even as someone generally pretty dismissive of the AI hype, I'm not sure you can go that far. The whole reason we have specific mathematical notation is that human languages often are not super great at dealing with it, and English in particular is pretty abysmal for being both unambiguous and precise (and I'd be surprised if language models didn't end up suffering from biases analogous to how many image recognition AI models have been found to not deal well with a diverse set of human appearances). We don't teach math the same way we teach English, and we certainly don't expect people to be experts at teaching both, so why would we expect an AI model designed for language to be able to do math?
Because there is an algorithm for it. Convert the strings into floating point numbers, add them, convert them back to strings. It’s a leetcode medium question. It should be learnable.
The article talks about abstract math questions, but even arithmetic is hard for language models.
That even arithmetic is hard for language models may suggest language models (at least in their current form) are not the most optimum for the task.