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They are reasoning, it's just that they have inhuman cognitive structures. You can trip up humans with optical illusions or camouflage and we accept this as normal. AIs don't see letters, they see tokens so counting letters can trip them up.
Claude 3.7 is great with code, processing thousands of lines, finding what's relevant, deducing problems from error messages. It's much worse at UI. But it cannot see like we can. How good would you be at making a UI if you had no eyes, if you just read a description of what was on the screen?
It's decent at strategy games. I let 3.6 make the strategic decisions in a game of civ 4 (Duel) and implemented its strategy and it achieved a quick victory over Noble-level 2006 AI. Most children couldn't do that. I spotted a couple of errors but it performed pretty well.
Go try some of the questions they're asking these AIs. This is from the GPQA:
That is a pretty hard question! How many of us could answer it?
How is it even possible in principle to solve code questions, write out hundreds of lines to perform a specific task if you can't reason? How can it write historical counterfactuals if it can't reason? You can RP out scenarios with it and it's capable of advancing strategies, modelling 3rd parties.
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