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Comment by jeremyjh | Hacker News Reader

So you are just going to ignore the data (not anecdotes) presented in the SP?

ChatGPT isn't the right tool to use for checking if numbers are prime. It is tuned for conversations. I'd like to see a MathGPT or WolframGPT.

The real question is if ChatGPT is worse on math and better elsewhere, or just worse overall. That is still unknown

> "ChatGPT isn't the right tool to use for checking if numbers are prime. It is tuned for conversations."

Two months ago they were telling me ChatGPT is coming for everyone - programmers, accountants, technical writers, lawyers, etc.

Now we're slowly back to "so here's the thing about LLMs"...

It's been well know from the start that these LLMs aren't optimized for math. I remember reading discussions when it came out.

You weren't paying attention.

And yet my Google engineer friend tells me to use Bard for my math coursework. I know it’s just an anecdote but what’s with the hype?

I was paying attention and it’s why I refuse to use LLMs for math, but I’m being told by people inside the castle to do so. So it is not so black and white in the messaging dept.

I have a tenured architect proposing that we stop sending structured data internally between two services (JSON) - and instead pass raw textual data spat out by an LLM which linguistically encodes the same information.

Literally nothing about this proposal makes sense. The loss of precision/accuracy (the LLM is akin to applying one-way lossy and non-deterministic encoding to the source data), the costs involved, efficiency, etc.

All just to tell everybody they managed to shove LLMs somewhere into the backend.

That last sentence is pretty dismissive and unnecessary, maybe even outright mean. It's possible that the person you're replying to is simply not as deeply ingrained in the technical literature as you are, or has more demands on their time than you do.

It didn’t seem particularly mean to me.

Who were 'they'? The same people who were telling you you'd be zooming around a bitcoin-powered metaverse on your Segway, then having your self-driving car bring you back to your 3d-printed house to watch 3d TV?

There's a certain type of person who sees a new thing, and goes "this will change everything". For every new thing. Very occasionally, they're right, by accident. In general, it's safest to be very, very sceptical.

Don't lump me or the other skeptical voices in with those zealots.

Interestingly enough, ChatGPT can generate Wolfram language queries.

> Can you give me a query in Wolfram language for the first 25 prime numbers?

> Prime[Range[25]]

> What about one for the limit of 2/x as x tends towards infinity?

> Limit[2/x, x -> Infinity]

Edited out most of the chatter from it for clarity.

All the SP is saying is it used to be able to perform that task, and now it can't. That means it has changed. Whether it was ever the best tool to perform any task is open to debate.

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