About whether LLMs should hand arithmetic to calculators or get smart enough to do it.
Has this happened?
Yes 67 (49%)Not sure 37 (27%)No 34 (25%)
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 LLMs should hand arithmetic to calculators or get smart enough to do it.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
I agree with you that we don't know if will take 10x or 1 million. We don't know if current LLM will scale at all. It might not be the way to AGI.
But while we can delegate the math to the calculator, it's essentially sweeping the problem under the rug. It actually tells you your neural net is not very smart. We know for a fact that it was exposed to tons of math during training, and it still can't do even the most basic addition reliably, let alone multiplication or division.
What we want is an actually smart network, not a dumb search engine that knows a billion factoids and quotes, and that hallucinates randomly.