Some earlier accounts describe model arithmetic as a collection of heuristics, whereas this work identifies a small algorithmic calculator that may coexist with noisy heuristics in the same model.

“um models do arithmetic with a bag of heuristics or if you look at the cross-layer transcoder work that um from anthropic they also look at arithmetic and again it looks like a sort of bag of heuristics um but when you look at it in a different way it is actually like a sort of a little algorithm and it might be the model does both right there's some bits in it which are”

“noisy heuristics and there's this bit which is like the good calculator and it's just never got rid of the heuristics um”