Looking for a specific research illustration on how LLMs "do maths"
Looking for a specific research illustration on how LLMs "do maths"
Hey all,
I'm losing my wits over not being able to find an article again that I've seen either on lemmy or reddit, and I figured this community might know.
It was about a research team somehow cracking open an LLM and looking at the way it does calculations, and I remember there was a sort of flowchart in the article, with the LLM grouping interim results into weird-ass categories, like "between 26-ish and 34-ish", and then using a separate process for figuring out the last digit.
I think the article might have been linked in response to a question like why LLMs mess up the last digit of number calculations.
Any of this rings a bell to someone? I've tried searching for it in any way I can phrase the idea, but all I get is a flood of ads and guides about "how to do math in LLMs".
FWIW, LLMs don't do maths. They predict what they think the next token it should generate based on what tokens you give it to start from.
If they are doing maths under the hood, they've snuck an actual calculator in there and pretended it's "AI".
That's not entirely correct. They kinda "do maths". I tried to google OP's answer, and there's a bunch of papers showcasing how LLMs develop circuits to handle numbers. (I didn't find that specific one, though.) Of course everything is prediction with LLMs. But seems they try to form a model how to do base-10 maths. Surely they're bad at it and not a real calculator. And you're right. What people usually tend to do is give them tool access. Either to a proper calculator, or more often a Python sandbox and there will be a prompt to write a Python snippet to do arithmetic. But the usual models can also add and multiply smaller numbers without anything in the background. That's not really an achievement, they can simply memorize the basic multiplication tables.
Correct me if I'm wrong but what you're describing still sounds like a probabilistic output, right? Meaning it's not the same output every time (meaning it can't actually be doing math).
that's why I put it in quotes :)