LLMs from OpenAI, Google, Meta, and others have been touted for their impressive reasoning skills. But research suggests their purported intelligence may be closer to "sophisticated pattern matching" than "true logical reasoning." Yep, even OpenAI's o1 advanced reasoning model.

For a while now, companies like OpenAI and Google have been touting advanced "reasoning" capabilities as the next big step in their latest artificial intelligence models. Now, though, a new study from six Apple engineers shows that the mathematical "reasoning" displayed by advanced large language models can be extremely brittle and unreliable in the face of seemingly trivial changes to common benchmark problems.

Apple researchers have argued that performance benchmarks may overstate AI reasoning capabilities. In an experiment, they found that even minor changes to benchmark questions resulted