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by viraptor 913 days ago
LLMs are not trained to deal with numbers as such. It's a list of symbols and some obvious things will be calculated correctly, some other won't. It's kind of like they live in a pre-digits world, since 0 will be one token and 100 is also likely one token, but 98 may be two. They don't switch to a "these are numbers and require different kind of reasoning" mode. They read/write a story about those "words".

(Extremely simplified for eli5)