LLMs don’t do formal reasoning
Relevant new research on LLMs from 6 AI researchers at Apple, challenging a dominant opinion and answering an important question: can Large Language Models (LLMs) truly reason? (turns out they cannot) Or are they just sophisticated pattern matchers? (turns out they are)
Many interesting results described in the paper. As an example, even o1-preview, OpenAI’s latest and most advanced model, demonstratibly makes silly mistakes. Either it doesn’t understand what ‘now’ is, or it doesn’t understand what ‘last year’ is, or a more likely explanation is that its training data with inflation has this pattern, and it’s following that again:
