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 [...] ---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?--- First published: April 15th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sgpCuokhMb8JmkoSn/untitled-draft-7shu) --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO). ---Images from the article:)))
