About whether ChatGPT understands math, prompted by the essay "And yet It Understands".
Has this happened?
Yes 65 (59%)Not sure 31 (28%)No 14 (13%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether ChatGPT understands math, prompted by the essay "And yet It Understands".
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
The issue I'm pointing to here doesn't have anything to do with deep understanding of primes built over years of education etc etc. All I'm saying is that ChatGPT doesn't know that 2^2 = 4 means 2^2 * a = 4 * a for any a.
ChatGPT is often good at understanding patterns involving the substitution of one string for another. So you might hope that it could do well in a case like this. But it doesn't really. It is aware of the laws of arithmetic and can explain them in the abstract but it can't apply them consistently in the real world.
I look forward to seeing how GPT-4 does as well. I don't have ready access to it. Looks like I would have to pay to get ChatGPT 4. But I will go out on a limb and predict that it won't be hard to generate this kind of issue with the new version.