Comment by nearbuy

> This gives it the ability to approximate multiplication problems it hasn't seen before.

More than approximate. It straight up knows the algorithms and will do arbitrarily long multiplications correctly. (Within reason. Obviously it couldn't do a multiplication so large the reasoning tokens would exceed its context window.)

Having ChatGPT 5.4 do 1566168165163321561 * 115616131811365737 without tools, after multiplying out a lot of coefficients, it eventually answered 181074305022287409585376614708755457, which is correct.

At this point, it's less misleading to say it knows the algorithm.