Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mjburgess 961 days ago
It isnt making mistakes ... its never actually doing it.

Do you see a difference between the process of adding numbers and dividing by their count (taking a mean) and emitting numeric tokens which are most probable for a given input?

The former is called "taking a mean" the latter isnt. This system never engages in any method to summarise financial data. It's method is always the same: to emit tokens most probable given a set of historical tokens.

It's the difference between saying "the average of 1,2,3" is 2 because that sentence occurs 1,000,000 times and saying it's 2 because you've literally computed it.

This system does not run financial summary algorithms. It's a trick

1 comments

To add to your point: try asking ChatGPT to do basic arithmetic on numbers it hasn't seen before. You'll see just how good it is at computation.
It's better (GPT-4) than you could manage without an external tool or pad. and that's after being severely hampered by tokenization. https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.02989