Program-Aided Language Models: stop making the model do the math
Article summary
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Ask a language model how many times the letter "r" shows up in "strawberry" and there's a decent chance it says two. Ask it to compound $2,500 at 7% for eight years and it might quietly switch to simple interest and hand you $3,900 instead of $4,295.47. The reasoning sounds fine. The number is wrong. And the model is exactly as confident either way. This isn't a bug you can prompt your way out of, because it's baked into what the model is . A language model predicts the next token . When it…
1Key Takeaways
- Ask a language model how many times the letter "r" shows up in "strawberry" and there's a decent chance it says two.
- Ask it to compound $2,500 at 7% for eight years and it might quietly switch to simple interest and hand you $3,900 instead of $4,295.47.
- And the model is exactly as confident either way.
- This isn't a bug you can prompt your way out of, because it's baked into what the model is .
2AIWedia Score
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3Why it matters
Prompt and agent patterns spread fast; staying current saves time and token cost. DEV — Prompt Engineering reports that ask a language model how many times the letter "r" shows up in "strawberry" and there's a decent chance it says two.
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