Numeracy from Literacy: Data Science as an Emergent Skill from Large Language Models

Understand

Large language models (LLM) such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT-3 offer unique testbeds for exploring the translation challenges of turning literacy into numeracy.

• Previous publicly-available transformer models from eighteen months prior and 1000 times smaller failed to provide basic arithmetic.
• The statistical analysis of four complex datasets described here combines arithmetic manipulations that cannot be memorized or encoded by simple rules.
• The work examines whether next-token prediction succeeds from sentence completion into the realm of actual numerical understanding.