About GPT-4 Turbo's better multi-digit arithmetic and whether LLMs truly reason about math.
Has this happened?
Yes 43 (39%)Not sure 37 (33%)No 31 (28%)
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 GPT-4 Turbo's better multi-digit arithmetic and whether LLMs truly reason about math.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
But the point about how it just "improves" with slightly larger numbers, but still fails at really big numbers, shows that it's not really "reasoning" about math in a logical way - that's the point I was getting at.
For example, once you teach a grade schooler the basic process for addition, they can add 2 30 digit numbers correctly fairly easily (whether they want to do it or not is a different story). The fact that LLMs still make errors at larger numbers points to the fact that they're not really "learning" the rules of arithmetic.