You do realize that arithmetic is a very simple symbolic manipulation task? All you have to do is keep track of the carry. I haven't seen an LLM that couldn't get digit by digit addition done, but they always mess up the carry.
Just like humans. Try to get regular people do e.g. add 15-16 digit numbers (where is typically where I'd see GPT4 start to get "sloppy" unless you prompt it the way you would a child who's learning and is still prone to get annoyed and wonder why the hell you make them to it manually), and see how many start making mistakes.
I find it really comical that this is what people complain about GPT over - there's zero benefit to get LLMs to get good at this over other tasks. To the extent we get it "for free" as a benefit of other learning, sure, but when we make kids practice this over and over again to drill doing it without getting sloppy, it has traditionally been out of some belief that it's important, but a computer will always have a "calculator" that is far more efficient than the LLM at its disposal and it's idiocy to care about whether it does that part well the tedious and hard way or knows how to describe the problem to a more efficient tool
I also find it comical that people use tasks where LLMs behaviour is if anything mot human-like, in its tendency to lose focus and start taking shortcuts (before GPT4 started writing Python instead, it'd for a while try really hard to not give you a step by step breakdown and instead clearly take shortcuts even you prompted it heavily to reason through it step by step), when presented with stupidly repetitive tasks as examples of how they're not good enough.
this goes into the heart of what it means to "know".
All human knowledge is "symbolic". that is, knowledge is a set of abstractions (concepts) along with relations between concepts. As an example, by "knowing" addition is to understand the "algorithm" or operations involved in adding two numbers. reasoning is the act of traversing concept chains.
LLMs dont yet operate at the symbolic level, and hence, it could be argued that they dont know anything. LLM is a modern sophist excelling at language but not at reasoning.
Is this rant really necessary? Most models, especially ChatGPT4 can perform carry based addition and there is zero reason for them to fail at it, but the moment you start using quantized models such as the 5 bit mixtral 8x7b the quality drops annoyingly. Is it really too much to ask? It's possible and it has been done. Now I'm supposed to whip out a python interpreter for this stuff, because the LLM is literally pretending to be a stupid human, really?
