Asking the bot for some mathematical computations gives crazy answers

[tiny hamlet]

I tried different expressions but it was not able to give the correct answer. Some examples:

I asked: "How much 1 / (1 + 0.2)^17"

And got:

To calculate 1 / (1 + 0.2)^17, we can start by simplifying the expression in the parentheses:

1 + 0.2 = 1.2

So we have:

1 / (1.2)^17

Now we can use a calculator or a computer to evaluate this expression. When we do, we get:

0.0204

So 1 / (1 + 0.2)^17 is approximately 0.0204.

Then i said "Hm, I think this is wrong"

And got

I apologize for the mistake in my previous response. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.

To correctly calculate 1 / (1 + 0.2)^17, we can start by raising 1.2 to the power of 17, which gives us:

1.2^17 = 14.9790538373

Then, we can take the reciprocal of this result to get:

1 / (1 + 0.2)^17 = 1 / 14.9790538373 = 0.0664469589

Therefore, 1 / (1 + 0.2)^17 is approximately 0.0664469589. I apologize for any confusion caused by my earlier response.

And so on...

Tried a few more but to no avail, they were all wrong. The answer is 0.045 (or 0.04507324411). The Bot somehow messes up the signs or something.

[crude condor]

Prior to around January 8, GPT apparently wasn't trained on math data (I found similar problems, raised them here, and got that response). Apparently some math training is now included (according to ChatGPT itself), but I still get unreliable results, like needing multiple tries to add a row of 1's and 0's. Very frustrating, but I wouldn't trust calculated values at this point.