It can't do art or writing either. It's like a genius suffering from the advanced stages of Mad Cow Disease. You have to badger it for hours and lower your expectations before it produces something acceptable.

[–] Hudell@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 days ago

It can't even count.

AI loves to present information in fancy formats like tables and lists, but it can't even enumerate a table's rows reliably.

[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

One small point to mention, LLMs != AI. "LLMs", or large language models, are the chatbots you see being promoted as "AI". LLMs are under the umbrella of AI, but not all AI models are LLMs. This is very important. LLMs are essentially a more complicated version of autocomplete, except that it predicts the next sentence(s). LLMs are pretty bad at maths, but not all AI models are bad at it!

There are many applications where (non-LLM) AI models are being used in science, and some of them are genuinely pretty cool! Not just in math-aligned fields either, AI models can be used anywhere with a large quantity of data that needs to be processed. You also need to take into account that these models are usually only trained on relevant data for the specific study, making them far more focused and less contaminated than your average LLM, which is fed pretty much the entirety of the Internet (garbage in, garbage out).

LLMs owned by big corporations aren't that great at most things and are horribly inefficient, but AI in the general sense could be an important tool (not a replacement, but a TOOL!) for science and discovery...

It doesn't help that marketing corpo people say the AI keywords twice a sentence in literally everything.

[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Personally, I don't find that LLMs can be considered "AI", since I define intelligence as being able to understand the problem given. As LLMs don't actually know what the input means like humans do, I think it shouldn't be considered intelligent.

[–] Baizey@feddit.dk 0 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Well then you will hate to know you define AI wrong. It's just artificial intelligence, it does not mean that the intelligence is particularly smart. AI really just means a computer imitating/performing something that we generally consider a challenge of the mind. A calculator, maze solver, sudoku solver, chess ai, video game NPC, and LLM all count under this. Just as bacteria counts as biological intelligence

[–] sbeak@sopuli.xyz 1 points 23 hours ago

Fair enough!

[–] FishFace@piefed.social 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It can do maths. It cannot do arithmetic. And actually nowadays it seems ok at arithmetic. (It farms arithmetic out to dedicated, non-language based sub agents)

Two weeks ago I was testing a draft of a puzzle to see how ai would do on it, with a page of about fifteen maths problems ranging from basic arithmetic up to easy integrals. It got all but one correct. (So that puzzle needs adjusting...)

I think people who say this remember how it couldn't count letters three years ago and think that's the end of the story.

[–] thedeadwalking4242@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago (2 children)

It still can't to math or arithmetic, they have it set up so it will use tools like Wolfram or just straight python for calculation.

By their very nature they suck ass at math

[–] FishFace@piefed.social 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You:

they have it set up so it will use tools like Me:

It farms arithmetic out to dedicated, non-language based sub agents

Is there an echo in here?

Even if I interpret you charitably, you are using the word "it" to mean "LLMs", instead of "AI". That isn't valid or useful. Nobody cares very much whether specific classes of neural network are good at maths; they care whether ChatGPT is going to give them the right answer. Go waste some of OpenAI's money right now by asking it a question on mathematics, and see whether "AI can do maths".

This gets even more ludicrous when you look at what AI is enabling in real mathematics, rather than in arithmetic.

[–] ltxrtquq@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

they have it set up so it will use tools like Me:

What an unfortunate formatting error you've made. Add an extra line break after your quote blocks to separate them.

[–] FishFace@piefed.social 2 points 2 days ago

Huh, doesn't render that way on my instance!

[–] AeonFelis@lemmy.world -1 points 2 days ago

It can do it better than I thought. Normally it'd spin Python, as you said, so I tried asking it to not use tools:

[–] Toribor@corndog.social -2 points 2 days ago

Most big LLMs will pass the math off to a more typical service that will solve the math problem deterministically and then pass the result back to the LLM to include in its response.

So yeah LLMs can'tactually do math but from a user perspective they can.

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It's a little computer of course it can do maths. Where it struggles is working out what math to do, but so do humans.

If I need to work out what 12 out of 294 is as a percentage I just Google it. I can never remember the formula, the actual mathematics is not complicated, it's the formula I can't remember, and it's the same with the AI.

[–] ranzispa@mander.xyz 7 points 2 days ago

I get your point, I often search for equations, but really 12/294*100 is not so difficult to remember.

You've got two numbers and a division, putting the in the wrong order will give you a clearly wrong result.

The problem with LLMs is that they are not reliable at numerical calculations even if they got the correct equation. But that is now easily fixed by giving them access to computation software.