[ogogmad]

You should ask it to show its working. The problem is that it uses a fixed amount of thinking for each character - and it writes left to right - while long multiplication is computed right to left. Past a certain number of digits, the amount of "thinking" needed to compute long multiplication in the wrong order (left to right) increases without bound -- accuracy suffers as a result.

A tangential point: Note that multiplication of decimal numbers _has_ to start with the rightmost digit to be done accurately. Consider x = 2/3 + 1/3 = 0.6(6) + 0.3(3), all digits repeating infinitely many times, so there's no rightmost digit: Notice that whichever digit you choose for x before the decimal point (either 0 or 1) could be wrong if you change any digit of 1/3. This is called the Table Maker's Dilemma.

The second paragraph is a tangent. My point was made in the first paragraph.

You said: "I dont think this is about notation" - Why did you ever think it was?

[newswasboring]

I was thinking along the lines of maybe it reads the digits as individual tokens and reading from left to right it get confused. That's why I thought it might be about notation. I have learned it's definitely not the case (read a bit about what tokens actually mean)

I also tried the show your work methods. I will not paste my conversations here as they are so long but even with showing it's work it doesn't give the right answer. Two funny things I noticed

1. It either uses a completely wrong method to calculate it, or it shows the right "kind" of work and then gets the wrong answer

2. If I tell it it was wrong and it will just agree with me. I multiply two huge numbers and tell it no the answer is actually 42, it will just apologize. Then when I ask the reason why it thinks it's right it will give the most bullshit things lol. Once it even said "I read the number wrong, the second number should be x I read y". The thing is if I had actually given x in the input it would have gotten the answer right.

It's all very confusing.