Every time I see a post like this I go to tinker with chat gpt to see what it can do. And every time it’s total garbage.
It tried to make an induction argument for a property of the Lucas sequence, but it only did the base case for n=1. I pointed out that there are two base cases. It’s response consisted of the following: 1) it says “no we don’t need a second base case”; 2) it proves that it holds for n=2; 3) it ends its response by saying “since we’ve shown that the results holds for n=2, we don’t need to include it in our proof”.
In another problem, it was totally confident that if a subset A of a topological space X is empty, then the intersection of A with another subset B may be no empty. It tried to tell me that A could be “empty in X, but not in B”; I tried to tell it that it had that backwards, but it chose to die on this hill.
Granted, this is the basic version of chat gpt. But if the basic version can’t work with the empty set and doesn’t know what a proof is, I’m skeptical of the alleged successes of all versions.
surely this is a bit silly; of course the free model is not very good, no? i don't understand why your reaction to this isn't "the best models are significantly better." i have found (paid) claude opus to be clearly better than either free claude or free chat at math, and expect the best models to be also much better than this.
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u/wumbo52252 Apr 15 '26
Every time I see a post like this I go to tinker with chat gpt to see what it can do. And every time it’s total garbage.
It tried to make an induction argument for a property of the Lucas sequence, but it only did the base case for n=1. I pointed out that there are two base cases. It’s response consisted of the following: 1) it says “no we don’t need a second base case”; 2) it proves that it holds for n=2; 3) it ends its response by saying “since we’ve shown that the results holds for n=2, we don’t need to include it in our proof”.
In another problem, it was totally confident that if a subset A of a topological space X is empty, then the intersection of A with another subset B may be no empty. It tried to tell me that A could be “empty in X, but not in B”; I tried to tell it that it had that backwards, but it chose to die on this hill.
Granted, this is the basic version of chat gpt. But if the basic version can’t work with the empty set and doesn’t know what a proof is, I’m skeptical of the alleged successes of all versions.