[jameshart]

I don’t think you have an ‘arithmetic’ part of your brain.

What you have that LLMs lack is a visual part of your brain - one which can instantly count quantities of objects up to about 7. That gives you tools that can be trained to do basic arithmetic operations. Although you have to be taught how to use that natural capability in your brain to solve arithmetic problems.

And of course for more complex things than simple arithmetic, you fall back on verbalized reasoning and association of facts (like multiplication tables) - which an LLM is capable of doing too.

Poor GPT though has only a one dimensional perceptual space - tokens and their embedding from start to end of its attention window - although who’s to say it doesn’t have some sense for ‘quantity’ of repeated patterns in that space too?