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Notes -
Francois Chollet is a disingenuous midwit who makes himself sound smart by arguing against strawmen. He reminds me of Stephen Jay Gould. In general his claims are a mix of: things that everyone already agrees with (like that LLMs are currently missing some sorts of long-chain reasoning abilities) or things that are a mix of simply wrong and meaningless word games (like that LLMs are merely memorizing).
To his credit, he released a new benchmark, but imo it's more poorly-motivated than lots of other benchmarks measuring performance on similarly reasoning-y but real tasks.
I agree that Chollet is overly negative on LLMs, but what's the issue with the benchmark? It's a set of well-structured problems that any child could solve, but most current models fail miserably at. My only complaint about it is that he makes it impossible for leading LLMs to actually compete in it.
I agree the benchmark is a real contribution. My claim is that there are similarly novel-reasoning-heavy benchmarks that also look more like useful tasks. such as https://klu.ai/glossary/gpqa-eval
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