It's not dismissible as a misunderstanding of tokens. LLMs also embed knowledge of spelling - that's how they fixed the strawberry issue. It's a valid criticism and evaluation.
A more accurate analogy for humans would be to imagine if every word had a colour. You are told that there are also a sequence of different colours that correspond to the same colour as that word. You are even given a book showing every combination to memorise.
You learn the colours well enough that you can read and write coherently using them.
Then comes the question of how many chocolate-browns are in teal-with-a-hint-of-red. You know that teal-with-a-hint-of-red is a fruit and you know that the colour can also be constructed by crimson followed by Disney-blond. Now, do both of those contain chocolate-brown or just one of them, how many?
It requires excersizing memory to do a task that is underrepresented in the training data because humans simply do not have to do the task at all when the answer can be derived from the question representation. Humans also don't have the ability that the LLMs need but the letter representation doesn't need that ability.
The issue is that people claim the performance is representative of a human's performance in the same situation. That gives an incorrect overall estimation of ability.
> For the multiplication task, note that agents that make external calls to a calculator tool may have ZEH = ∞. While ZEH = ∞ does have meaning, in this paper we primarily evaluate the LLM itself without external tool calls
The models can count to infinity if you give them access to tools. The production models do this.
Not that the paper is wrong, it is still interesting to measure the core neural network of a model. But modern models use tools.
Humans can fly, they just need wings!
More generally, the ability to use tools is a form of intelligence, just like when humans and crows do it. Being able to craft the right Python script and use the result is non-trivial.
What the user sees is the total behavior of the entire system, not whether the system has internal divisions and separations.
At least in theory.
There’s plenty of math that I couldn’t even begin to solve without a calculator or other tool. Doesn’t mean I’m not solving math problems.
In woodworking, the advice is to let the tool do the work. Does someone using a power saw have less claim to having built something than a handsaw user? Does a CNC user not count as a woodworker because the machine is doing the part that would be hard or impossible for a human?