philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

A.I. Can Write Poetry, but It Struggles With Math

... Chatbots like Open AI’s ChatGPT can write poetry, summarize books and answer questions, often with human-level fluency. These systems can do math, based on what they have learned, but the results can vary and be wrong. They are fine-tuned for determining probabilities, not doing rules-based calculations. Likelihood is not accuracy, and language is more flexible, and forgiving, than math. ...

Traditionally, computers have been programmed to follow step-by-step rules and retrieve information in structured databases. They were powerful but brittle. So past efforts at A.I. hit a wall.

Yet more than a decade ago, a different approach broke throughand began to deliver striking gains. The underlying technology, called a neural network, is loosely modeled on the human brain.

This kind of A.I. is not programmed with rigid rules, but learns by analyzing vast amounts of data. It generates language, based on all the information it has absorbed, by predicting what word or phrase is most likely to come next — much as humans do. ...

A few months ago, Khan Academy made a significant change to its A.I.-powered tutor, called Khanmigo. It sends many numerical problems to a calculator program instead of asking the A.I. to solve the math. While waiting for the calculator program to finish, students see the words “doing math” on their screens and a Khanmigo icon bobbing its head. ...

See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/23/technology/ai-chatbots-chatgpt-math.html