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p-e-w | on: Switcher (2004)
> AI is a powerful tool because it can use tools and can also build tools for you to use or for it to use. But it is not a calculator.

It’s both, and a million other things. Of course AI can do complex calculations today. I can’t even remember the last time I saw an AI make a mistake on something like that.

The problem is that people’s mental image of what AI can do always has an inertia of 6-12 months. Like you can still see people talking about how image generation models supposedly can’t draw hands, even though today we have 2K AI-generated video with perfect hands.

rmunn | parent | next
I've seen AI-generated videos posted two weeks ago with six fingers on someone's hand. I don't know what model they used, but it still happens. Less often than it used to, granted, but it still happens.
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sampullman | parent | next
The latest models can do fairly complex arithmetic without tools now, but they're definitely not calculators.
cadamsdotcom | parent
It can do basic arithmetic because it's fed millions or billions of synthetic calculations as training data.

Quick!

What's the next top-k tokens after each of these?

"999 + 999 = "

"999.0 + 999.0 = "

"999 * 2 = "

"999 * (3-2) = "

Mathematically identical. But as a token sequence, not so much.

Modern models will of course have very similar next-token distributions across all of these. But not identical!

Now add a few digits and you quickly land in territory whose synthetic training data is much sparser.

Code has determinism and runs in milliseconds. It's the better tool for the job.

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