Fail ChatGPT in math!

Monterey.- The ChatGPT Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot has rocked educators since its launch in November and New York public schools have banned it from their school networks and devices, but there is one subject area that does not seem threatened: mathematics As it turns out, it’s pretty bad, The Wall Street Journal reported.

“I don’t hear math teachers expressing concern about it,” said Paul von Hippel, a professor at the University of Texas who studies data science and statistics and wrote an essay on ChatGPT’s mathematical limitations.

While the bot answers many basic arithmetic questions correctly, it stumbles when the questions are written in natural language. For example, ask ChatGPT “if a banana weighs 0.5lbs and I have 7lbs of bananas and 9 oranges, how many pieces of fruit do I have?”, the bot’s quick response: “You have 16 pieces of fruit, 7 bananas and 9 oranges “.

The bot miscalculates the square roots of large numbers. Ask him to show you his math, and he often produces detailed formulas that look great, but contain errors, such as 2 x 300 = 500.

WSJ noted that ChatGPT’s struggle with mathematics is inherent in this type of AI, known as a large language model. It scans huge amounts of text from all over the web and develops a model of which words are likely to follow others in a sentence.

It’s a more sophisticated version of autocomplete that, after typing “I want” on a device, guesses that the next words are “to dance with someone,” “to know what love is” or “to be with you everywhere,” WSJ described. .

“ChatGPT is incredibly limited, but good enough at a few things to create a misleading impression of greatness. It’s a mistake to trust it for anything important right now,” Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company, warned on Twitter in December. bot creator.

Eventually, the AI ​​will probably reach the point where its mathematical answers are not only safe, but correct.

A pure big language model may not be up to the job, but the technology will get better. The next generation of AI could combine the language skills of ChatGPT with the math skills of Wolfram Alpha.