Whimsical follow up here: $100k invested in the S&P 500 around 1984 would be $4.5mm today. Thought some people would like to know this as well :)

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a day ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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rjrjrjrj a day ago | parent | prev [-]

$100k invested in AAPL around 1984 would be worth $329.5M, excluding dividends

At least that’s what ChatGPT says

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cadamsdotcom a day ago | parent [-]

My recommendation is to have ChatGPT write code to solve calculations like this, and have it put the data it fetches as constants in said code.

AI is not a calculator, but it'll try to fake it - and above say, three or four digits, there's not enough training data to guarantee accuracy enough of the time. Labs probably train models on massive amounts of arithmetic, but still. It's not the right tool for the job.

Now, ChatGPT won't solve problems with code unless asked, but if you ask, it has its own full computer and can write code for it!

AI is powerful because it can use tools and can build tools for you to use or for it to use.

But it is not a calculator.

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pmarreck a day ago | parent | next [-]

Early on, pretty much as soon as it was able to run arbitrary Python code it created (note: it can use other languages now too! Ask it!), I instructed it to NEVER guess at any question that is best served by computing it or counting it, and to always write a small program to do the computation or counting instead.

So I never actually saw the "strawberry" problem since it always just wrote a program to count the "r"'s!

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cowlevel a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

ChatGPT has been secretly doing that under the hood for many months now.

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a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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p-e-w a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> AI is a powerful tool because it can use tools and can also build tools for you to use or for it to use. But it is not a calculator.

It’s both, and a million other things. Of course AI can do complex calculations today. I can’t even remember the last time I saw an AI make a mistake on something like that.

The problem is that people’s mental image of what AI can do always has an inertia of 6-12 months. Like you can still see people talking about how image generation models supposedly can’t draw hands, even though today we have 2K AI-generated video with perfect hands.

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rmunn a day ago | parent | next [-]

I've seen AI-generated videos posted two weeks ago with six fingers on someone's hand. I don't know what model they used, but it still happens. Less often than it used to, granted, but it still happens.

	▲	cadamsdotcom a day ago \| parent [-]
		Smaller models save money so even more slop can be generated. Creator did you a favor making their slop so detectable ;)

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sampullman a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The latest models can do fairly complex arithmetic without tools now, but they're definitely not calculators.

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cadamsdotcom a day ago | parent | prev [-]

It can do basic arithmetic because it's fed millions or billions of synthetic calculations as training data.

Quick!

What's the next top-k tokens after each of these?

"999 + 999 = "

"999.0 + 999.0 = "

"999 * 2 = "

"999 * (3-2) = "

Mathematically identical. But as a token sequence, not so much.

Modern models will of course have very similar next-token distributions across all of these. But not identical!

Now add a few digits and you quickly land in territory whose synthetic training data is much sparser.

Code has determinism and runs in milliseconds. It's the better tool for the job.

	▲	jmmcd a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		But if you add a few digits, the model writes a python or js program to calculate, it doesn't use next-token to guess. (BTW the last one was meant to be (3-1).)
	▲	a day ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
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	▲	speerer a day ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I think it might get the last one of those questions correct.
	▲	41353aab a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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