• “Surprising LLM reasoning failures make me think we still need qualitative breakthroughs for AGI” by Kaj_Sotala

  • Apr 17 2025
  • Length: 36 mins
  • Podcast

“Surprising LLM reasoning failures make me think we still need qualitative breakthroughs for AGI” by Kaj_Sotala

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  • Summary

  • 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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