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I assumed seanhunter was suggesting getting the LLM to convert x^2 + 5x + 4 = 0 to a short bit of source code to solve for x.

IIRC Wolfram Alpha has (or had, hard to keep up) a way to connect with ChatGPT.




It does. This is the plugins methodology described in the toolformers paper which I've linked elsewhere[1]. The model learns that for certain types of problems certain specific "tools" are the best way to solve the problem. The problem is of course it's simple to argue that the LLM learns to use the tool(s) and can't reason itself about the underlying problem. The question boils down to whether you're more interested in machines which can think (whatever that means) or having a super-powered co-pilot which can help with a wide variety of tasks. I'm quite biased towards the second so I have the wolfram alpha plugin enabled in my chat gpt. I can't say it solves all the math-related hallucinations I see but I might not be using it right.

[1] But here it is again https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04761


GPT4 does even without explicitly enabling plugins now, by constructing Python. If you want it to actually reason through it, you now need to ask it, sometimes fairly forcefully/in detail, before it will indulge you and not omit steps. E.g. see [1] for the problem given above.

But as I noted elsewhere, training its ability to do it from scratch matters not for the ability to do it from scratch, but for the transferability of the reasoning ability. And so I think that while it's a good choice for OpenAI to make it automatically pick more effective strategies to give the answer it's asked for, there is good reason for us to still dig into its ability to solve these problems "from scratch".

[1] https://chat.openai.com/share/694251c9-345b-4433-a856-7c38c5...




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