ChatGPT’s great at maths? No problem, celebrity professor tells Hong Kong students as humans win for thinking, creativity
- Learning to think will give humans the edge, says Loh Po-shen, who celebrates maths everywhere he goes
- ChatGPT provides an impetus to end rote learning and get students to focus on solving problems creatively, he says
Celebrity mathematics Professor Loh Po-shen is irrepressible when it comes to promoting the wonders of the subject, but he has been thinking a lot about ChatGPT.
The artificial intelligence-powered software, capable of producing convincing humanlike responses to queries about practically anything within seconds, is capable of doing maths too.
Loh found ChatGPT’s maths prowess to be equal to that of the top 0.1 per cent of secondary school students he has taught – and he has worked with some of the best, in elite classes for teenagers and as coach of the United States’ international maths Olympiad teams for 10 years until last year.
But he is unbothered by what the chatbot can do, because he spotted what it still cannot do: brainstorm creative solutions to unfamiliar problems. And that was where human beings still had the edge.
“This is what the future is – that people need to be able to learn how to think, and then fortunately, ChatGPT comes along,” he said when he stopped in Hong Kong on a speaking tour that included Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Suzhou and Shenzhen.
US-born Loh is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but has gained international renown for his enthusiastic promotion of maths.