[frodetb]

My friend shared some screenshots of ChatGPT giving a convincing response to the prompt

    > Outline a proof of the snake lemma

Satisfied with the output, my friend then asked it to outline a proof of the Riemann hypothesis, and rather than being tricked into gibberish maths jargon or miraculously producing such a proof, ChatGPT accurately and briefly summarized the hypothesis, explained some limitations of current knowledge and paths such a proof might take. It did a better job at it than I would have.

Because of these examples, even though they are examples of mathematics rather than computation, I don't think it's fair to be so dismissive. It's a bit of a well known fun fact that a lot of professional mathematicians are terrible at mental arithmetic.

[jibalt]

This is a basic and common misunderstanding. ChatGPT is able to do that because people are able to do it and their reasoning appears in ChatGPT's database, which it syntactically links to your queries. It has no semantic understanding of the content.

People aren't being "dismissive", they are explaining how ChatGPT works and why that is very different from being able to do math.