Comment by margalabargala
1 hour ago
If they took a blurry photo of the piece of paper and uploaded to chatGPT saying "solve this" then I would totally believe it. The frontier models are mostly obnoxiously bad at OCR and properly ingesting what's on an image of a page.
If you write out the 4th grade math problem, they would have no trouble.
No, LLMs just can't do math.
If your math does not involve multiplying 20 digit numbers, modern LLMs can "do" math even without a Python tool despite the counterintuition of next token prediction.
They can definitely recognize the problem class and build programs to do math. So what's the difference?
It's like saying that people can't turn high torque nuts on machine bolts, because you can't use your fingers to do it. But you can use a wrench, so effectively, we can turn high torque nuts on machine bolts even though it isn't something we can natively do unaided.