This just exposes that they don't even do the thing you said.

Not only is it still true that they can't do math directly, but not even indirectly.

They didn't write a python script to do the math, they found bits of code that are associated with "math" and the supplied arguments.

Someone else already wrote that code and someone else categorized it so that it could be associated with the kinds of problems it applies to.

That isn't an example of idiot at one thing while good at another thing, or solving the same problem just a different way or indirectly. It's being the same idiot at all times. If an actual non idiot thinker didn't write code in the problem domain, and some non idiot thinker didn't tag it as being relevant to that domain, then it wouldn't happen.

It's nothing more than an sql query.

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astrange 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

GPT-6 can do math directly just fine. Fable apparently can't because they broke its self-estimate of thinking effort.

https://x.com/maksym_andr/status/2100364212207837560

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bombela 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't know for you, but it would take me more than 30s to find and translate the open source code implementing the formulae/algo into small usable program. The more hesoteric the optimisation in the original code, the more time I need.

So maybe it is more of a smart completion engine than a SQL answer.

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walrus01 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> they found bits of code that are associated with "math" and the supplied arguments

How is this different from a human using an algorithm they have memorized, or reading it from a reference site written by a human and then writing the same formula into a custom one off piece of python code?

I could have gone and spent a couple of days teaching myself the math behind Karney and reading its reference implementation (very possibly just copy/pasting big chunks of it to save time) and writing a wrapper around it. It would have produced the same result.

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AdieuToLogic 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>> they found bits of code that are associated with "math" and the supplied arguments

> How is this different from a human using an algorithm they have memorized, or reading it from a reference site written by a human and then writing the same formula into a custom one off piece of python code?

Humans identify which "algorithm they have memorized" to use beforehand, due to the problem to be solved being defined by other humans, which leads to...

Wait for it...

Understanding.

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hodgehog11 an hour ago | parent [-]

This doesn't make any sense at all. Was this supposed to be a gotcha? An LLM is trained on problems defined by other humans, and identifies which algorithm it must use based on pattern recognition. The pattern recognition is also particularly compressed into its most sparse and fundamental components, as this is key to generalization. This is not a sensible difference between human and LLM learning, we do the same thing.

	▲	UpsideDownRide 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I'll give you a recent example from my usage. Pi harness with extension for learning Chinese. When using it to feed drill questions to me and rate answers it would sometimes get lost in the sauce and start generating user aka me answer and then rate it and comment it. It's trivially wrong to the point that if a person would do that, they would be considered for some serious psych issues. And it gets even better since when called out it wouldn't just take my word for it but only acknowledged the issue after parsing the log with clearly delineated user and model output. So yeah while impressive things are able to be done, the current models are also dumb AF and an idiot savant is a pretty good label for them.

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noduerme 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If by "result" you mean the final code, then just asking someone else who understood the math to write it would also have achieved the same result.

On the other hand, if by "result" you mean that you gained knowledge or understanding of the code in a way where you could personally tailor its behavior to specific circumstances without asking for help, then it's not the same result at all.

I find a lot of the arguments that having LLMs write your code is no different from copy/pasting Stack Overflow answers to be specious. They blur the line between asking for help and asking for someone else (or something else) to do the work for you. What they ignore is that doing the work yourself has ancillary benefits and is a valuable end in its own right.