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Liang: Language models should use calculators instead of computing internally

Dr. Percy Liang · No Priors Ep. 7 | With Stanford Professor Dr. Percy Liang · Apr 25, 2023 · at 16:09

Stanford computer science professor Dr. Percy Liang discusses the integration of external tool use versus native computation inside transformer foundation models.

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“There are cases where you want to just map natural language into say people call it tool use. Like you ask some question that reverse calculation, you should just use a calculator rather than trying to sort of quote unquote do it in the transformers head.”

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