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Comment by thorncorona | Hacker News Reader

Can you explain how the problem is solved for someone who doesn't understand racing?

Sure thing! If the race is 20 minutes and each lap takes 2m04s, that means there will be 9.67 laps till the race is over, and you round that up to 10 since partial laps must be finished. You need 2.73 liters per lap, so the 10 laps will use 27.3 liters total. GPT-4 is correct in suggesting a tiny safety buffer above that in case fuel usage differs from expected.

It's a math word problem, in which LLM's would not perform well. I have no idea why people try stuff like this.

People try stuff like this because it's precisely the kind of problem that AI would be useful for. If one of these models turned out to be really good at it, it would signify that they're now useful for a whole class of problems.

If you want to solve math problems, LLMs are very useful for this. Exactly how trained professionals are.

You make the model write code for you to solve it.

Would you ask your dad to compute the correlation matrix between 40 thousand vectors? No? Then don't ask an LLM to do it.

I ask ChatGPT / Bard to do all kinds of things I wouldn't ask my Dad for. This is a weird perspective.

Besides, GPT-4 did solve this question perfectly. I like that rather than just involving math, there’s also some real life knowledge needed to give a practical answer.

Because it exposes accuracy problems as querys often involve implied or implicit math skills.

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