LLMs Fail Middle School Word Problems, Say Apple Researchers

AI Mimics Reasoning Without Understanding, Struggles With Irrelevant Data Rashmi Ramesh (rashmiramesh_) • October 14, 2024

Cutting-edge large language models would fail eighth grade math, say artificial intelligence researchers at Apple - likely because AI is mimicking the process of reasoning rather than actually engaging in it.

See Also: Cybersecurity Awareness Engagement Toolkit: Elevate Your Security Culture

Company researchers tested a handful of large model's ability to handle that bane of word problem solvers everywhere: extraneous information meant to throw off the solution.

OpenAI o1-mini and Llama3-8B fell for it exactly as a perplexed test-taker would, falling inexorably for the misdirection.

"Overall, we find that models tend to convert statements to operations without truly understanding their meaning," researchers wrote in a paper submitted earlier this month.

Among the tests designed to probe LLMs' ability to reason, researchers prompted LLMs with the ...