Evaluating 35 open-weight models across three context lengths (32K, 128K, 200K), four temperatures, and three hardware platforms—consuming 172 billion tokens across more than 4,000 runs—we find that the answer is “substantially, and unavoidably.” Even under optimal conditions—best model, best temperature, temperature chosen specifically to minimize fabrication—the floor is non-zero and rises steeply with context length. At 32K, the best model (GLM 4.5) fabricates 1.19% of answers, top-tier models fabricate 5–7%, and the median model fabricates roughly 25%.
What do you even mean? Calculators and LLMs are solving different problems. And there are a lot of calculators and a lot of LLMs. Also, calculator accuracy could be approaching 0% because they all have limited precision and there are infinite numbers. Some of the calculators even can’t correctly answer
0.1+0.2, while most LLMs can do that.