Agreed. However, humans also don't have an internal multiplication algorithm, but can nonetheless use a scratchpad to multiply accurately (in extreme circumstances :P). I've chosen multiplication as an example here because it's maybe the "simplest" thing GPT-4 can't consistently do.
What I'm finding interesting here is that GPT-4 knows how to break down multiplications (it can write perfect recursive code for multiplying large numbers). It also knows about chain of thought prompting. How close is it to being able to just... directly use the algorithms it knows? What's the minimum amount of prodding needed? The following prompt is an upper bound on how hard it is to teach GPT-4 accurate multiplication:
To multiply largeGPT-4 perfectly understands e.g. Karatsuba multiplication and can consistently multiply two-digit numbers, but hasn’t connected those dots; it needs some hand-holding to correctly use a multiplication algorithm. What’s the shortest prompt that gets GPT-4 to multiply 6-digit integers with over 75% accuracy?
Right, but that seems to imply you had to give up spending the time and attention elsewhere. There are definitely times where spending time with a certain person is pretty close to a terminal goal. And in that case "spending" seems to be a bit of a misleading word.