> Pattern matching questions on a contrived test is not the same thing as understanding or reasoning.

Pattern matching is definitely the same thing as understanding and reasoning.

The problem is that LLMs can't recognize patterns that are longer than a few paragraphs, because the tokens would have to be far too long. LLMs are a thing we are lucky to have because we have very fast computers and very smart mathematicians making very hard calculations very efficient and parallelizable. But they sit on top of a bed of an enormous amount of human written knowledge, and can only stretch so far from that bed before completely falling apart.

Humans don't use tokenizers.

The goal right now is to build a scaffolding of these dummies in order to get really complicated work done, but that work is only ever going to accidentally be correct because of an accumulation of errors. This may be enough for a lot if we try it 1000x and run manually-tuned algos over the output to find the good ones. But this is essentially manual work, done in the traditional way.

edit: sorry, you're never going to convince me these things are geniuses when I chat to them for a couple of back and forth exchanges and they're already obviously losing track of everything, even what they just said. The good thing is that what they are is enough to do a lot, if you're a person who can be satisfied that they're not going to be your god anytime soon.