ChatGPT knows how to multiply step by step without either of those, but like a human, who'll be annoyed and usually sloppy if you ask them to do things step by step instead of taking shortcuts, you increasingly need to push it to get it to do so with care.

The irony of these objections is that people speak out of a "but we learned to do that at school" way of thinking, often on the basis of above average skills, rather than considering that while most people maybe could (I'm not convinced), most people won't do it step by step unless you really goad them into it and pay attention that they don't skip or gloss over steps.

The question is inability of ChatGPT to do logical reasoning. Multiplying numbers is a simple test to prove this.

The same with coding: it can produce code for tasks where something similar was in training dataset, but if you ask to do completely unknown problem - it will fail.