By: Wesley Zhao

With AI being used more often, people are relying on it to do more important tasks. For example, AI is used for one of the most basic subjects: math. But AI somehow struggles to solve math problems.

Chatbots like ChatGPT can generate summaries, poems, and essays but can’t do math.

Chatbots can calculate probability but can’t preform rule-based calculations. “The A.I. chatbots have difficulty with math because they were never designed to do it,” said Kristian Hammond, a computer science professor and artificial intelligence researcher at Northwestern University. (New York Times,2024) AI is more of a Shakespeare rather than a Pythagores.

“Traditionally, computers have been programmed to follow step-by-step rules and retrieve information in structured databases. They were powerful but brittle. So past efforts at A.I. hit a wall.”(New York Times,2024)

AI isn’t programmed with the right rules to solve math problems, but instead analyzes various amounts of data. It generates the answer based on the information it has been taking in. Although it produces amazing answers, it doesn’t do some basic math problems.

AI chatbots can’t comprehend simple arithmetic and word problems. Khan Academy made a chatbot that was specifically programmed to do math. It’s called Khanmigo. However, OpenAI also has been working to make ChatGPT improve in the field math, as it sometimes just stops working when given a math problem.

AI is a revolutionary idea and could change the way we run our lives. But for now, we can only rely on it to do a small amount of this. Who knows? Maybe in the future AI will be running our lives and doing our daily work!

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/23/technology/ai-chatbots-chatgpt-math.html