A lot of maths students would also struggle to contribute to frontier math problems, but we would still say they are reasoning. Their skill at reasoning might not be as good as professional mathematicians, but that does not stop us from recognising that they can solve logic problems without memorisation, which is a form of reasoning.
I am just saying that LLMs have demonstrated they can reason, at least a little bit. Whereas it seems other people are saying that LLM reasoning is flawed, which does not negate the fact that they can reason, at least some of the time.
Maybe generalisation is one area where LLM's reasoning is weakest though. They can be near-elite performance at nicely boxed up competition math problems, but their performance dramatically drops on real-world problems where things aren't so neat. We see similar problems in programming as well. I'd argue the progress on this has been promising, but other people would probably vehemently disagree with that. Time will tell.
A lot of people appear to be - often not consciously or intentionally - setting the bar for "reasoning" at a level many or most people would not meet.
Sometimes that is just a reaction to wanting an LLM that is producing result that is good for their own level. Sometimes it reveals a view of fellow humans that would be quite elitist if stated outright. Sometimes it's a kneejerk attempt at setting the bar at a point that would justify a claim that LLMs aren't reasoning.
Whatever the reason, it's a massive pet peeve of mine that it is rarely made explicit in these conversations, and it makes a lot of these conversations pointless because people keep talking past each other.
For my part a lot of these models often clearly reason by my standard, even if poorly. People also often reason poorly, even when they demonstrably attempt to reason step by step. Either because they have motivations to skip over uncomfortable steps, or because they don't know how to do it right. But we still would rarely claim they are not capable of reasoning.
I wish more evaluations of LLMs would establish a human baseline to test them against for much this reason. It would be illuminating in terms of actually telling us more about how LLMs match up to humans in different areas.
I am just saying that LLMs have demonstrated they can reason, at least a little bit. Whereas it seems other people are saying that LLM reasoning is flawed, which does not negate the fact that they can reason, at least some of the time.
Maybe generalisation is one area where LLM's reasoning is weakest though. They can be near-elite performance at nicely boxed up competition math problems, but their performance dramatically drops on real-world problems where things aren't so neat. We see similar problems in programming as well. I'd argue the progress on this has been promising, but other people would probably vehemently disagree with that. Time will tell.