[jonathankoren]

No. A million times no. It’s a language model. It doesn’t understand math at all. It doesn’t even understand language. All it did was spit out something that looks like math. It’s fancy automatic writing.

I’ll concede that if you tokenized the equations correctly, you might be able to get a language model to learn arithmetic, since it’s just symbol manipulation; but to make the leap that a general text model has learned anything like arithmetic is more than two bridges too far.

While deep learning language models are useful for certain cases (eg translation, and autocomplete), and are better at making superficially grammatical text than previous models; they are most emphatic my not learning anything about general concepts. They can’t even create coherent text for more than a paragraph, and even then it’s obvious they have no idea what any of the words actually mean.

These large language models are the MOST overhyped piece of AI I’ve seen in my professional career. The fact that they’re neural nets redux is just the chef’s kiss.

[rasen58]

Isn’t your comment that you wrote here also just a bunch of “symbol manipulation“?

It definitely hasn’t learned math but it definitely has learned general concepts

[jonathankoren]

1) No. Because I didn’t compute anything. This is the result of cognition. There’s a difference. If you think there isn’t, the burden of proof is on you show that they’re the same, as this has never been the dominate belief either now, nor for the last thousands of years.

2) What general concept has it learned? You can’t pull any fact consistently out of these things, because they don’t actually have a model of a world. They have statistical correlations between words. There’s no logical inference. They’re just Eliza.