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.

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!

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

> 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.