Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ffwd 959 days ago
I have a question which I don't know the answer to:

With those structured numbers will the LLMs be 100% accurate on new prompts or will they just be better than chance (even significantly better than chance)?

Because this is one thing, it has to learn the structure and then create probabilities based on the data, but does that mean it's actually learning the underlying algorithm for addition for example or is it just getting better probabilities because of a narrowing of them? If it can indeed learn underlying algorithms like this that's super interesting. The reason also this is in an issue if it _can't_ learn those, you can never trust the answer unless you check it, but that's sort of a sidepoint.

1 comments

From what I understand, it can learn and execute the algorithm fairly reliably, though it won't be 100%. When the LLM generates text, it is randomised a little, as well as some tricks that prevent repetition, which would likely cause problems with numbers containing all the same digit.