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by samatman 856 days ago
I'd be careful using LLMs to learn mathematical concepts. I asked ChatGPT for the axioms of set theory, I was still in the "use ChatGPT as a search engine to see what happens" phase. It left out two of them and got one subtly wrong. It's the last bit you really have to watch out for.

Math is exact. It's a bad fit for a machine-that-guesses-words.

1 comments

The good thing about math is that it's possible to verify the result in many cases even if the method used to produce the result is too difficult to understand. Also, if I ask ChatGPT & Gemini to walk me through the problem step-by-step, I know enough to follow and detect errors. E.g, Gemini kept getting errors because it used the wrong starting potential energy for a pendulum and assumed the pendulum had a max PE of 0 at the top of the swing (and a negative PE at the bottom) which caused it to have a max velocity of 0 due to incorrectly applying the conservation of energy.

But you're right that someone who doesn't understand a subject should be wary of trusting LLMs to teach the subject.