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by Barrin92 2130 days ago
>because GPT-3 can do simple math

It can't actually, and again this is an example of the same issue. This was discussed earlier here[1]. Sometimes it produces correct arithmetic results on addition or subtraction of very small numbers, but again this is likely simply an artifact of training data. On virtually everything else it's accuracy drops to guesswork, and it doesn't even consistently get operations right that are more or less equivalent to what it just did before.

If it actually did understand mathematics, it would not be good at adding two or three digit numbers but fail at adding four digit numbers or doing some marginally more complicated looking operation. That is because that sort of mathematics isn't probabilistic. If it had learned actual mathematical principles, it would do it without these errors.

Mathematics doesn't consider of guessing the next language token in a mathematical equation from data, it consists of understanding the axioms of maths and then performing operations according to logical rules.

This problem is akin to the performance of ML in games like breakout. It looks great, but then you adjust the paddle by five pixels and it turns out it hasn't actually understood what the paddle or the point of the game is at all.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23896326

1 comments

GPT-3's failure at larger addition sizes is almost fully due to BPE, which is incredibly pathological (392 is a ‘digit’, 393 is not; GPT-3 is also never told about the BPE scheme). When using commas, GPT-3 does OK at larger sizes. Not perfect, but certainly better than should be expected of it, given how bad BPEs are.

http://gptprompts.wikidot.com/logic:math

My thinking there wasn't because of BPEs, I think it's a graph traversal issue.