If I ask GPT4 about some arcane math concept it’ll wax lyrical about how it has connections to 20 other areas of math. But it fails at simple arithmetic.
One of my better math professors in a very good pure math undergraduate program added 7 + 9 and got 15 during a lecture, that really doesn't say anything about his ability as a mathematician though.
Who knows, OP could be a paint sniffer and that’s their root issue. Brainstorming these things requires creativity and even hallucination. But that’s not what doctors do.
Does it though? When allowing LLMs to use their outputs as a form of state they can very much succeed up to 14 digits with > 99.9% accuracy, and it goes up to 18 without deteriorating significantly [1].
That really isn't a good argument because you are asking it to do one-shot something that 99.999% of humans can't.
If allow LLMs to do the same instead of producing the output in a single textual response, then they will do just fine according to the cited paper.
Average humans can do multiplication in 1 step for small numbers because they have memorized the tables. So can LLMs. Humans need multiple steps for addition, and so do LLMs.
Regarding of the number of steps it takes an LLM to get the right answer: isn't it more important that it gets the right answer, since LLMs are faster than humans anyway?
LLMs get the right answer and do so faster than humans. The only real limitation here is the back and forth because of the chat interface and implementation. Ultimately, it all boils down to giving prompts that achieve the same thing as shown in the paper.
Furthermore, this is a weird boundary/goal-post humans get stuff wrong all the time, and we created tools to make our lives easier, if we let LLMs use tools, they do even better.
The cited paper covers this to some extend. Instead of asking the LLMs to do multiplication of large integers directly, they ask the LLM to break the task into 3-digit numbers, do the multiplications, add the carries, and then sum everything up. It does quite well.
I read a report of a doctor who tried it on his case files from the ER (I’m sure it was here in HN) It called some of the cases correctly, missed a few others, and would have killed one woman. I’m sure it has its place, but use a real doctor if your symptoms are in any way concerning.
Or, look at it this way: the LLM doesn't have a "voice in its head" in any form other than a back-and-forth with you. If I gave you any arithmetic problem less trivial than the times table, you won't suddenly come up with the right answer - you'll do some sequence of steps in your head. If you let an LLM voice the steps, it gets better at procedural tasks too.
If a search engine result says water is wet, they’ll tell you about it.
If not, then we should consider all the issues around water and wetness, but note that water is a great candidate for wetting things, though it is important to remember that it has severe limitations with respect to wetting things, and, at all costs some other alternatives should be considered, including list of paragraphs about tangential buzzwords such as buckets and watering cans go here.
The only reason failing at basic arithmetic indicates something when discussing a human is because you can reasonably expect any human to be first taught arithmetic in school. Otherwise, those things are hardly related. Now, LLMs don't go to school.
If that's your best argument, you don't have an argument.
Literally the majority of the page is basic arithmetic, mostly Bayes. Diagnosis is a process of determining (sometimes quantitative, sometimes qualitative) the relative incidences of different diseases and all the possible ways they can present. Could this be X rare virus, or is it Y common virus presenting atypically?