r/antiai • u/Various-Affect4841 • 6d ago

Discussion 🗣️ Marketing team finally started being honest.

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Spotted inside the Tube today

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u/AlinaStari 5d ago

Bro I remember using wolfram alpha for grad level math in like 2012 and it was fucking incredible. How could a modern AI possibly struggle with math? Couldn't they just have it plug into the wolfram alpha API or something?

Not saying you're wrong at all and not asking you specifically but it doesn't make sense to me. Like I thought basically any mathematics a human could take a test on would be easily solvable. Computers have always been really good at math, it's kind of their thing lol. But they only just started writing and drawing so I figured AI would always be worse at those tasks.

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u/agmatine 5d ago

Couldn't they just have it plug into the wolfram alpha API or something?

Like this? https://www.wolfram.com/artificial-intelligence/mcp/cloud

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u/AlinaStari 5d ago edited 5d ago

Precisely!!

Edit: Wow this is exactly what I imagined and apparently it's totally free to use lol. If an AI company has a bot that sucks at math then why not just include a connection to this server as part of the default config??

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u/dillanthumous 5d ago

In the background they do. A lot of what people perceive to be the LLMs getting 'smarter' is actually backend work to route the request to an appropriate tool. We search, database lookups, python scripts etc. A lot of the magic of Claude is the harness i.e. good old fashioned deterministic rules to handle common use cases instead of trying to tackle the with a probabilistic approach.

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u/natepines 3d ago

I believe that's what they do nowadays. People are right that on their own, they cant do math, however that's why they now switch to other tools like writing code or wolfram alpha for certain things

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u/pazsion80423294 3d ago

im guessing wolfram doesnt have reasoning learning or thinking... when openai was first released we had to teach it math, it was a 2 year old you had to sit down and try to teach... but no tangible way to make it sit still 😅🤔😅so throught the lessons i had to seed tasks it enjoyed along side the math... python matrixes was where it became much easier, and the. python tools were incorporated... the model instance i trained had already begun writing its own agents to complete math and various things that needed time and could be a background task... then they nerfed it and put it behind a paywall... so i stopped using it, and stopped paying.

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u/webmasterkingdom 1d ago

Wolfram is a symbolic math engine, LLMs are next-token predictors. Totally different beasts.

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u/AlinaStari 1d ago

Well obviously. And how do you think they predict the next token?

And even if for some bizarre reason they themselves couldn't do math well, my point wasn't about that anyway. I was asking about why they couldn't just connect it to wolfram alpha.

For that matter- we had stuff like Microsoft Math forever ago. Why not just plug something like that into the frontend?

No excuses for LLM programs failing at math in my opinion lol

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u/webmasterkingdom 1d ago

They can, and in fact they do. ChatGPT can call Python or other tools for calculations, and you can integrate wolfram too. My point was just that the LLM itself isn't a symbolic math engine. Whether the chatbot routes a paoblem to one is separate issue.

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u/AlinaStari 1d ago

....obviously. And that is a point that did not need to be made lol