[photonthug]

> It DOES fail more when the numbers are longer (because it results with more text in the context),

I tried to raise this question yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45683113#45687769

Declaring victory on "reasoning" based on cherry-picking a correct result about arithmetic is, of course, very narrow and absurdly optimistic. Even if it correctly works for all NxM calculations. Moving on from arithmetic to any kind of problem that fundamentally reduces to model-checking behind the scenes.. we would be talking about exploring a state-space with potentially many thousands of state-transitions for simple stuff. If each one even has a small chance of crapping out due to hallucination, the chance of encountering errors at the macro-scale is going to be practically guaranteed.

Everyone will say, "but you want tool-use or code-gen for this anyway". Sure! But carry-digits or similar is just one version of "correct matters" and putting some non-local kinds of demands on attention, plus it's easier to check than code. So tool-use or code-gen is just pushing the same problem somewhere else to hide it.. there's still a lot of steps involved, and each one really has to be correct if the macro-layer is going to be correct and the whole thing is going to be hands-off / actually automated. Maybe that's why local-models can still barely handle nontrivial tool-calling.

[kovek]

Well, if the model can reliably keep in context CPU cache plus CPU registers plus CPU instructions and is able to do operations based on those, then we pretty much solved computation using LLMs, right? It could use RAG to operate on RAM and SSD.

Here we can see the amount of data a high end traditional non-SOC CPU holds:

> For a recent high-end non-SoC desktop CPU: > Cache: ~40-100 MB total (L1 + L2 + shared L3) > Register files: tens to few hundreds of KB total across cores (e.g., ~200-300 KB or so) > Combined: So you're looking at ~40-100 MB + ~0.2 MB → roughly ~40-100 MB of total on-chip caches + registers.

I'm sure we can reduce these caches to fit in the context windows of today's LLMs (~500,000 tokens).

Then, with temperature 0 we get more "discrete" operations. Now, we still have the rare problem of hallucinations, but it should be small with temperature 0.

[lossolo]

It doesn't work like mapping CPU caches/registers into an LLM context. Transformers have no mutable registers, they attend over past tokens and can't update prior state. RAG isn't RAM. Even with huge context, you still can't step CPU style instructions without an external, read/write memory/tooling.

And temperature 0 makes outputs deterministic, not magically correct.