By: Elena Luo
Why can’t AI handle math as well as it can handle Poems? Chat GPT, Open AI, and many other AI can’t handle complex math problems.
Even simple long division and multiplication requires a call to a calculator. This is hard to imagine, as AI can come up with detailed images and vivid articles and poems. In daily life there are always AI chat bots, grammar correctors, vocabulary checkers, and article enhancers, but you almost never have a reliable AI math problem solver.
Why is that?
First of all, the main reason that AI can’t do math is because of what it’s trained on. When AI originally started, people focused more on English Language Arts than Math.
At that time, there was no practical use for AI to handle math problems because AI wasn’t developed enough, and it wasn’t practical. But now, with modern AI technology, AI can easily understand complex math problems with enough training.
In the past few years, AI training models have not been developed very quickly, and Chat GPT still thinks that Queen Elizabeth is alive. If Chat GPT and other AI isn’t trained on it, then it won’t be able to understand and perform math problems as easily.
The next reason is probability. In AI’s code, there are things that make it seem more human. For example, every time you say, “Hello!” to it, it replies with different things, such as “How are you doing”, “Hi”, “What’s up?”, and much more.
Similarly, every time you ask it to randomly write you an article, it doesn’t always come up with a zombie appearing in your refrigerator. Instead, it always improvs like in the human would. Unlike Language Arts and English though, math has no “probability” or “chance.”
One question would only have one correct answer, even if that answer is multiple, there is still only one set of answers, making math finite. And AI was developed to generate human-like text, making AI a little behind on things that need precision, because even humans don’t have exact language efficiency and fluency.
But can AI ever be good at math? The short answer is yes, AI can be good at math. In fact, in the future, AI might even surpass humans in math. But, for now, AI has many weak points, and indefinite parts that need a lot of improvement before AI, like Chat GPT, can start developing a strong ability for math.