New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Why does ChatGPT struggle so much with counting?

Ask HN: Why does ChatGPT struggle so much with counting?
4 by logicallee | 3 comments on Hacker News.
I've been playing with ChatGPT and am impressed by its ability to produce code and, to a certain extent, seem to reason about novel questions and situations and seem to engage in abstract analysis even on totally novel subjects. However, it really struggles with basic counting compared with most people. For example, I tested it asking about primes between certain intervals, first I asked "Are there more prime numbers between 1 and 10 or between 10 and 20?" and after it answered correctly I asked "Are there more prime numbers between 10 and 20 or between 20 and 30?". It answered: "There are four prime numbers between 10 and 20: 11, 13, 17, and 19. There are also six prime numbers between 20 and 30: 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, and 43. So there are more prime numbers between 20 and 30 than between 10 and 20." The middle sentence clearly contains an error. Why does chatGPT make such errors and struggle so much with numbers? What would it take to "fix" it so it could be more human-like in its use of numbers?

Comments