The recent Apple "LLMs can't reason yet" paper was exactly this. They just tested if models could run an exponential number of steps. Of course, they gave it a

The recent Apple "LLMs can't reason yet" paper was exactly this. They just tested if models could run an exponential number of steps. Of course, they gave it a terrible clickbait title and framed the question and graphs incorrectly. But if they did the study better it would have been "How long of a sequence of algorithmic steps can LLMs execute before making a mistake or giving up?"