Photo-Illustration: Wired Staff; Bill Ross/Getty 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. The fragility highlighted in these new results helps support previous research suggesting that LLMs’ use of probabilistic pattern matching is missing the formal understanding of underlying concepts needed for truly reliable […]