Comment by simonw
3 hours ago
They can. ChatGPT has been able to count characters/words etc flawlessly for a couple of years now if you tell it to "use your Python tool".
3 hours ago
They can. ChatGPT has been able to count characters/words etc flawlessly for a couple of years now if you tell it to "use your Python tool".
Fair enough. But why do I have to tell them that, should they not be able to figure it out themselves? If I show a 5-year kid once how to use colour pencils, I won't have to show them each time they want to make a drawing. This is the core weakness of the LLMs - you have to micromanage them so much, that it runs counter to the core promise that is being pushed since 3+ years now.
Specifically for simple character level questions, if LLMs did that automatically, we would be inundated with stories about "AI model caught cheating"
They are stuck in a place where the models are expected to do two things simultaneously. People want them to show the peak of pure AI ability while at the same time be the most useful they can be.
Err too much on the side automatic use of tools and people will claim you're just faking it, fail to use tools sufficiently and people will claim that the AI is incapable of operations that any regular algorithm could do.
Are you sure? Isn´t one aspect of intelligence being able to use, apply and develop tools? Isnt that the core feature that got humanity ahead of other mammals? As an early adopter, I couldn´t have cared less if AI was cheating in terms of strictly academic terms. I care about results. Lets say we´re working on something together and I ask you what is the 123921 multiplied by 1212. As the most natural thing you will dish out your calculator and give me the result. Do I care how you reached it? No, so as long as the result is correct, reliable, repeatable and quick - AND - I did not specifically ask you to perform the calculation specifically by hand or only with your mental faculties. So this is missing from those tools and because we have to remember to tell them for each and every use case HOW to do it, they are not intelligent.
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