this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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It can do arithmetic now, instead of making up numbers out of thin air? That's the big secret Q* project? k
That's basically what I read out of it, but it's probably much bigger of a breakthrough than the article is suggesting.
Current AI isn't really intelligent at all. It's essentially just a search engine combined with that robot voice from TikTok videos. Of course it's more complicated than that but it helps to illustrate the point, which is that the AI you've interacted with thus far don't know if they're right about what they tell you. They're just hoping the answer they found was correct and stating it in an authoritative way that can confuse people who don't know the real answer to the question it was trying to answer.
Actual AI will be able to reason out correct answers from incomplete information and solve complex mathematical equations very quickly. Being able to solve basic math problems without just searching it's database for the correct answer is an important step towards real intelligence. It means we're no longer dealing with a hard drive attached to an answering machine, we're dealing with something that can process information in basically the same way we do, which opens up all sorts of awkward moral and philosophical questions.
Not sure about this upcoming development, but they had the math part solved already via a Wolfram Alpha plugin which integrated into ChatGPT. As you may already know, Wolfram can already solve complex math problems with just a natural language input, so this isn't anything revolutionary.
What would be revolutionary though is if it applied that same sort of logic beyond math, like towards language (and visual) outputs and be able to fact check, or at the very least, not contradict itself or hallucinate like it does sometimes.
It's not a terribly complicated idea, really. You can train it to output formatted calculations when presented with a problem, then something in the middle watches for those and inserts the solution for it behind the scenes. You might even trigger another generation to let it appear more smooth when presented to the user.