Reasoning Challenges in Large Language Models

Introduction

Writing this post puts me in a weird epistemic position. I simultaneously believe that:

• The reasoning failures that I'll discuss are strong evidence that current LLM- or, more generally, transformer-based approaches won't get us AGI
• As soon as major AI labs read about the specific reasoning failures described here, they might fix them
• But future versions of GPT, Claude etc. succeeding at the tasks I've described here will provide zero evidence of their ability to reach AGI. If someone makes a future post where they report that they tested an LLM on all the specific things I described here it aced all of them, that will not update my position at all.

That is because all of the reasoning failures that I describe here are surprising in the sense that given everything else that they can do, you’d expect LLMs to succeed at all of these tasks. The [...]

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Outline:

(00:13) Introduction

(02:13) Reasoning failures

(02:17) Sliding puzzle problem

(07:17) Simple coaching instructions

(09:22) Repeatedly failing at tic-tac-toe

(10:48) Repeatedly offering an incorrect fix

(13:48) Various people's simple tests

(15:06) Various failures at logic and consistency while writing fiction

(15:21) Inability to write young characters when first prompted

(17:12) Paranormal posers

(19:12) Global details replacing local ones

(20:19) Stereotyped behaviors replacing character-specific ones

(21:21) Top secret marine databases

(23:32) Wandering items

(23:53) Sycophancy

(24:49) What's going on here?

(32:18) How about scaling? Or reasoning models?

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First published:
April 15th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sgpCuokhMb8JmkoSn/untitled-draft-7shu

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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