

I see a lot of misunderstandings in the comments 🫤
This is a pretty important finding for researchers, and it’s not obvious by any means. This finding is not showing a problem with LLMs’ abilities in general. The issue they discovered is specifically for so-called “reasoning models” that iterate on their answer before replying. It might indicate that the training process is not sufficient for true reasoning.
Most reasoning models are not incentivized to think correctly, and are only rewarded based on their final answer. This research might indicate that’s a flaw that needs to be corrected before models can actually reason.
I’d encourage you to research more about this space and learn more.
As it is, the statement “Markov chains are still the basis of inference” doesn’t make sense, because markov chains are a separate thing. You might be thinking of Markov decision processes, which is used in training RL agents, but that’s also unrelated because these models are not RL agents, they’re supervised learning agents. And even if they were RL agents, the MDP describes the training environment, not the model itself, so it’s not really used for inference.
I mean this just as an invitation to learn more, and not pushback for raising concerns. Many in the research community would be more than happy to welcome you into it. The world needs more people who are skeptical of AI doing research in this field.