[EMIRELADERO]

> The LLM can't describe it, it doesn't see inside itself, however, it has many textbooks in its training dataset, so it will grab an answer from these textbooks because that's how people answer.

EDIT: I see now that you were referring to the answers it uses to justify the result, not the underlying computations. Sorry! You can disregard the actual comment. Leaving for completeness.

ORIGINAL COMMENT:

That's not how it works. Addition in LLMs is believed to function through different mechanisms depending on model size and architecture, but the single consistent finding across different models is that they generalize beyond the training data for at least those simple arithmetic operations.

For example: "Language models use trigonometry to do addition" https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00873

For a different "emergent" algorithm, see Anthropic's observations: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/met...