6 ms·

Reasoning is not model improvement

63 points by QueensGambit 1y ago

QueensGambit 1y ago
Hi HN, OP here. I'd appreciate feedback from folks with deep model knowledge on a few technical claims in the essay. I want to make sure I'm getting the fundamentals right. 1. On o1's arithmetic handling: I claim that when o1 multiplies large numbers, it generates Python code rather than calculating internally. I don't have full transparency into o1's internals. Is this accurate? 2. On model stagnation: I argue that fundamental model capabilities (especially code generation) have plateaued, and that tool orchestration is masking this. Do folks with hands-on experience building/evaluating models agree? 3. On alternative architectures: I suggest graph transformers that preserve semantic meaning at the word level as one possible path forward. For those working on novel architectures - what approaches look promising? Are graph-based architectures, sparse attention, or hybrid systems actually being pursued seriously in research labs? Would love to know your thoughts!
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  I don't think HN is a place for fact checking your blog.
  - Terr_ 1y ago
    On the other hand, "that's technically wrong" is an extraordinarily popular staple of online geek discussion. :p
- lawlessone 1y ago
  All i can say as someone sorta lay is that math isn't an LLM's strength. Having them defer calculations to calculators or python code seems better than it guessing that 1+1 = 2 because it's past data says 1+1 = 2
- cpa 1y ago
  I don't think 2 is true: when OpenAI model won a gold medal in the math olympiads, it did so without tools or web search, just pure inference. Such a feat definitely would not have happened with o1.
  - MoltenMan 1y ago
    True, but aren't the math (and competitive programming) achievements a bit different? They're specific models heavily RL'd on competition math problems. Obviously still ridiculously impressive, but if you haven't done competition math or programming before it's much more memorization of techniques than you might expect and it's much easier to RL on.
  - simonw 1y ago
    Yeah, I confirmed this at the time. Neither OpenAI nor Gemini used tools as part of their IMO gold medal performances. Here's OpenAI's tweet about this: https://twitter.com/SebastienBubeck/status/1946577650405056722 https://twitter.com/SebastienBubeck/status/19465776504050567... > Just to spell it out as clearly as possible: a next-word prediction machine (because that's really what it is here, no tools no nothing) just produced genuinely creative proofs for hard, novel math problems at a level reached only by an elite handful of pre‑college prodigies. My notes: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/19/openai-gold-medal-math-olympiad/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/19/openai-gold-medal-math... They DID use tools for the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) programming one though: https://twitter.com/ahelkky/status/1971652614950736194 https://twitter.com/ahelkky/status/1971652614950736194 > For OpenAI, the models had access to a code execution sandbox, so they could compile and test out their solutions. That was it though; no internet access.
    - emp17344 1y ago
      We still have next to no real information on how the models achieved the gold medal. It’s a little early to be confirming anything, especially when the main source is a Twitter thread initiated by a company known for “exaggerating” the truth.
      - 1y ago
- simonw 1y ago
  1 isn't true. o1 doesn't have access to a Python interpreter unless you explicitly grant it access. If you call the OpenAI API for o1 and ask it to multiply two large numbers it cannot use Python to help it. Try this: curl https://api.openai.com/v1/responses \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_API_KEY" \ -d '{ "model": "o1", "input": "Multiply 87654321 × 98765432", "reasoning": { "effort": "medium", "summary": "detailed" } }' Here's what I got back just now: https://gist.github.com/simonw/a6438aabdca7eed3eec52ed7df64eff0?permalink_comment_id=5821856 https://gist.github.com/simonw/a6438aabdca7eed3eec52ed7df64e... o1 correctly answered the multiplication by running a long multiplication process entirely through reasoning tokens.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - alganet 1y ago
    I see this: > "tool_choice": "auto" > "parallel_tool_calls": true Can you remake the API call explicitly asking it to not perform any tool calls?
    - simonw 1y ago
      I'm doing that here. It only makes tool calls if you give it a JSON list of tools it can call. Those are its default settings whether or not there are tools configured. You can set tool_choice to the name of a specific tool in order to force it to use that tool. I added my comment here to show an example of an API call with Python enabled: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45686779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45686779 Update: Looks like you can add "tool_choice": "none" to prevent even tools you have configured from being called. https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/responses/create#responses-create-tool_choice https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/responses/cre...
      - alganet 1y ago
        There are three possible generic values for `tool_choice`: none, auto and required. Can you remake the call explicitly using the value `none`? Maybe it's not using Python, but it's using something else. I think it's a good test. If you're right, then the response shouldn't change. Update: `auto` is ambiguous. It doesn't say whether is picking from your selection of tools or the pool of all available tools. Explicit is better than implicit. I think you should do the call with `none`, it can't hurt and it can prove me wrong.
- anonymoushn 1y ago
  I don't really know what you mean by "preserve semantic meaning at the word level." The significant misunderstanding about tokenization present elsewhere in the article is concerning, given that the proposed path forward is to do with replacing tokenization somehow.
  - remich 1y ago
    Right, words don't have semantic meaning on their own, that meaning is derived from surrounding context. "Cat" is both an animal and a bash command.
- ACCount37 1y ago
  Wrong on every count, basically. 1. You can enable or disable tool use in most APIs. Generally, tools such as web search and Python interpreter give models an edge. The same is true for humans, so, no surprise. At the frontier, model performance keeps climbing - both with tool use enabled and with it disabled. 2. Model capabilities keep improving. Frontier models of today are both more capable at their peak, and pack more punch for their weight, figuratively and literally. Capability per trained model weight and capability per unit of inference compute are both rising. This is reflected directly in model pricing - "GPT-4 level of performance" is getting cheaper over time. 3. We're 3 years into the AI revolution. If I had ten bucks for every "breakthrough new architecture idea" I've seen in a meanwhile, I'd be able to buy a full GB200 NVL72 with that. As a rule: those "breakthroughs" aren't that. At best, they offer some incremental or area-specific improvements that could find their way into frontier models eventually. Think +4% performance across the board, or +30% to usable context length for the same amount of inference memory/compute, or a full generational leap but only in challenging image understanding tasks. There are some promising hybrid approaches, but none that do away with "autoregressive transformer with attention" altogether. So if you want a shiny new architecture to appear out of nowhere and bail you out of transformer woes? Prepare to be disappointed.
  - throwthrowrow 1y ago
    Question #1 was on the model's ability to handle arithmetic. The answer to question seems to be unrelated, at least to me: "you can enable or disable tool use in most APIs". The original question still stands: do recent LLMs have an inherent knowledge of arithmetic, or do they have to offload the calculation to some other non-LLM system?
    - ACCount37 1y ago
      The knowledge was never the bottleneck for that, not since the days of GPT-3. The ability to execute on it was. Which includes, among other things, the underappreciated metacognitive skill of "being able to decide when to do math quick and dirty, in one forward pass, and when to write it out explicitly and solve it step by step". Today's frontier LLMs can do that. A lot of training for "reasoning" is just training for "execute on your knowledge reliably". They usually can solve math problems with no tool calls. But they will tool call for more complex math when given an option to.
- XenophileJKO 1y ago
  Point 2 is 1000% not true, the models have both gotten better at the overall act of coding, but have also gotten WAY better at USING tools. This isn't tool orchestration frameworks, this is knowing how and when to use tools effectively and it is largely inside the model. I would also say this is a fundamental model capability. This improved think->act->sense loop that they now form, exponentially increases the possible utility of the models. We are just starting to see this with gpt-5 and the 4+ series of Claude models.
  - emp17344 1y ago
    Yes, the models have gotten better at using tools because tech companies have poured an insane amount of money into improving tools and integrating them with LLMs. Is this because the models have actually improved, or because the tools and integration methods have improved? I don’t think anyone actually knows.
    - XenophileJKO 1y ago
      The models have improved. They are using "arbitrary tools" better.
      - emp17344 1y ago
        I don’t know what you mean, because arbitrary tools don’t integrate with LLMs in the first place. Are you referring to MCP?
    - remich 1y ago
      But, isn't improving tools and the LLM's integration with them improving the model? Caveat that we don't fully understand how human intelligence works, but with humans it's generally true that skills are not static or siloed. Improving in one area can generate dividends in others. It's like how some professional football players improve their games by taking ballet lessons. Two very different skills, but the incorporation of one improves the other as well as the whole. I would argue that narrowly focusing on LLM performance via benchmarks before tool use is incorporated is interesting, but not particularly relevant to whether they are transformative, or even useful, as products.
- mirekrusin 1y ago
  Reasoning model doesn't imply tool calling – those shouldn't be conflated. Reasoning just means more implicit chain-of-thought. It can be emulated by non reasoning model by explicitly constructing prompt to perform longer step by step thought process. With reasoning models it just happens implicitly, some models allow for control over reasoning effort with special tokens. Those models are simply fine tuned to do it themselves without explicit dialogue from the user. Tool calling happens primarily on the client side. Research/web access mode etc made available by some providers (based on tool calling that they handle themselves) is not a property of a model, can be enabled on any model. Nothing plateaued from where I'm standing – new models are being trained, releases happen frequently with impressive integration speed. New models outperform previous ones. Models gain multi modality etc. Regarding alternative architectures – there are new ones proposed all the time. It's not easy to verify all of them at scale. Some ideas that are extending current state of art architectures end up in frontier models - but it takes time to train so lag does exist. There are also a lot of improvements that are hidden from public by commercial companies.
- Legend2440 1y ago
  >I claim that when o1 multiplies large numbers, it generates Python code rather than calculating internally. I don't have full transparency into o1's internals. Is this accurate? Both reasoning and non-reasoning models may choose to use the Python interpreter to solve math problems. This isn't hidden from the user; it will show the interpreter ("Analyzing...") and you can click on it to see the code it ran. It can also solve math problems by working through them step-by-step. In this case it will do long multiplication using the pencil-and-paper method, and it will show its work.
- mxkopy 1y ago
  Not affiliated with anyone, but I think the likes of OptNet (differentiable constraint optimization) are soon going to play a role in developing AI with precise deductive reasoning. More broadly I think what we’re looking for at the end of the day, AGI, is going come about from a diaspora of methods capturing the diverse aspects of what we recognize as intelligence. ‘Precise deductive reasoning’ is one capability out of many. Attention isn’t all you need, neither is compression, convex programming, what have you. The perceived “smoothness” or “unity” of our intelligence is an illusion like virtual memory hiding cache, and building it is going to look a lot more like stitching these capabilities together than deriving some deep and elegant equation.
- kgeist 1y ago
  Try running local LLMs like Qwen3 yourself. They can calculate accurately in their reasoning traces even if you don't give them access to coding tools. In fact, even mid-range models (32b params) under 4-bit quantization can perform pretty well. No need to make guesses, you can try it yourself!
Terr_ 1y ago
> These are not model improvements. They're engineering workarounds for models that stopped improving. One might characterize it as an improvement in the document-style which the model operates upon. My favorite barely-a-metaphor is that the "AI" interaction is based on a hidden document that looks like a theater script, where characters User and Bot are having a discussion. Periodically, the make_document_longer(doc) function (the stateless LLM) is invoked to to complete more Bot lines. An orchestration layer performs the Bot lines towards the (real) user, and transcribes the (real) user's submissions into User dialogue. Recent improvements? Still a theater-script, but: 1. Reasoning - The Bot character is a film-noir detective with a constant internal commentary, not typically "spoken" to the User character and thus not "performed" by the orchestration layer: "The case was trouble, but I needed to make rent, and to do that I had to remember it was Georgia the state, not the country." 2. Tools - There are more stage-directions, such as "Bot uses [CALCULATOR] inputting [sqrt(5)*pi] and getting [PASTE_RESULT_HERE]". Regular programs are written to parse the script, run tools, and then replace the result. Meanwhile, the fundamental architecture and the make_document_longer(doc) haven't changed as much, hence the author's title of "not model improvement."*
- QueensGambit 1y ago
  Exactly. Both the theater script and code are metadata that manipulates entities: characters in a play or variables in memory. There's definitely abstract-level understanding emerging: that's why models can be trained on python, but write code in java. That could be instructions like pseudo-code or the hidden document/theater script you mentioned. That capability jump from GPT3 to o1 is real. But my point is: pure metadata manipulation has hit a ceiling or is moving at a crawling pace since o1. The breakthrough applications (like agentic AI) still depend on the underlying model's ability to generate accurate code. When that capability plateaus, all the clever orchestration on top of it plateaus too.
  - Terr_ 1y ago
    Just to confirm, as this topic gets "very meta" with levels of indirection, it sounds like you mean the LLM appends a "fitting" document fragment like: This was an unusual task Bot wasn't sure how to solve directly. Bot decided it needed to execute a program: [CODE_START]foo(bar(baz())[CODE_END] Which resulted in [CODE_RESULT_PLACEHOLDER] This stage-direction is externally parsed, executed, and substituted, and then the LLM is called upon to generate Bot-character's next reaction. In terms of how this could go wrong, it makes me think of a meme: > Thinking quickly, Dave constructs a homemade megaphone, using only some string, a squirrel, and a megaphone.
cat-whisperer 1y ago
I use thinking with claude cod extensively. It’s same as reasoning they just name it differently. It definitely helps, sometimes it feels like they came up with original thoughts and ideas
- esafak 1y ago
  Claude Cod. That would be a neat addition to their portfolio :)
  - remich 1y ago
    This just made me think of that wall-mounted singing fish. Someone should make a cursed version that connects to Claude.
daxfohl 1y ago
I've seen research that shows that starting with reasoning models, and fine-tuning to slowly remove the reasoning steps, allows you to bake the reasoning directly into the model weights in a strong sense. Here's a recent example, and you can see the digits get baked into a pentagonal prism in the weights, allowing accurate multi-digit multiplication without needing notes: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00184 https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00184. So, reasoning and tool use could be the first step, to collect a ton of training data to do something like this fine-tuning process.
- nightmunnas 1y ago
  This is what I deem to be more comparable to human reasoning, although in this case it happens at an extremely slow timescale. Ideally real reasoning would have an impact on the weights, although that would be practically impossible(very impractical with the current model architectures) and especially if the conversation is had with the broader public.
  - daxfohl 1y ago
    Yeah, kind of. Though it seems like humans do some post-analysis on the reasoning and kind of "root cause" the path to the result. Fine tuning on the raw thought output seems like it could capture a ton of unnecessary noise. I don't know if it would be able to capture the "aha" moment and encode that alone in a way that makes sense.
- QueensGambit 1y ago
  That's interesting, though I wonder if what's "baked into the weights" is closer to intuition than reasoning. Once reasoning traces are distilled into weights, the model stops thinking through problems and starts pattern-matching answers. That feels more like a stochastic parrot with intuition than an analytical reasoner.
  - daxfohl 1y ago
    I'd guess it works like any form of learning a subject. The better you have internalized the fundamentals, the better you can perform at higher level tasks. Though to that end, I wonder if the model "knows" that it "understands" the fundamentals better once it's been trained like this, or if when it has to do a large multiplication as part of a larger reasoning task, does it still break it down step by step.
skybrian 1y ago
The combination of LLM's and various other tools seems pretty powerful and it's the way industry is moving. Many combinations will be tried and whatever patterns work will be copied. LLM's and tools are co-evolving. I'm not sure why we should be dissatisfied with that?
ohadron 1y ago
> Each step moves further from "how do we build better models?" toward "how do we monetize the models we have?" I don't think OpenAI launching ChatGPT Apps and Atlas signals they're pivoting. It's just that when you raise that much money you must deploy it in any possible direction.
raincole 1y ago
It makes so little sense that it's hard to comment. > Unlike GPT-3, which at least attempted arithmetic internally (and often failed), o1 explicitly delegates computation to external tools. How is it a bad thing? Does the author really believe this is a bad thing? Even if we believe tech bros' most wild claim - AGI is around the corner - I still don't know why calling external tools makes an AGI less AGI. If you ask Terence Tao what 113256289421x89831475287 is I'm quite sure he'd "call external tools." Does it make him less a mathematician? Plus, this is not what people call "reasoning." The title: > Reasoning Is Not Model Improvement The content: > (opening with how o1 is calling external tools for arithmetic) ...anyway, whatever. I guess it's a Cunningham's Law thing. Otherwise it's a bit puzzling why someone knows nothing about a topic had to write an article to make everyone know how clueless they are.
- deleted 1y ago
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j45 1y ago
I wonder if the industry should be calling it simulated probabilistic reasoning vs the reasoning that deterministic software is able to reliably.
Legend2440 1y ago
This article is pretty much all wrong. Reasoning is not tool calling. Reasoning is about working through problems step-by-step. This is always going to be necessary for some problems (logic solving, puzzles, etc) because they have a known minimum time complexity and fundamentally require many steps of computation. Bigger models = more width to store more information. Reasoning models = more depth to apply more computation.
simonw 1y ago
There are several key points in this that I don't think are accurate. > When you ask o1 to multiply two large numbers, it doesn't calculate. It generates Python code, executes it in a sandbox, and returns the result. That's not true of the model itself, see my comment here which demonstrates it multiplying two large numbers via the OpenAI API without using Python: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45683113#45686295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45683113#45686295 On GPT-5 it says: > What they delivered barely moved the needle on code generation, the one capability that everything else depends on. I don't think that holds up. GPT-5 is wildly better at coding that GPT-4o was (and got even better with GPT-5-Codex). A lot of people have been ditching Claude for GPT-5 for coding stuff, and Anthropic held the throne for "best coding model" for well over a year prior to that. From the conclusion: > All [AI coding startups] betting on the same assumption: models will keep getting better at generating code. If that assumption is wrong, the entire market becomes a house of cards. The models really don't need to get better at generating code right now for the economic impact to be profound. If progress froze today we could still spend the next 12+ months finding new ways to get better results for code out of our current batch of models.
- behnamoh 1y ago
  > A lot of people have been ditching Claude for GPT-5 for coding stuff, and Anthropic held the throne for "best coding model" for well over a year prior to that. Even if GPT-5 was less capable of a coder than Claude, I'd still not use Claude because of its ridiculous quotas, context window restrictions, slowness, and Anthropic's pedantic stance on AI safety.
- tptacek 1y ago
  There's also the pretty simple observation that the ability to chain tool calls this way is itself a profound model improvement that occurred, in public mainstream foundation models, only a year ago.
- QueensGambit 1y ago
  OP here. Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Curious if you’ve measured o1’s accuracy and token cost with tool use enabled vs disabled? Wondering if python sandbox gives higher accuracy and lower cost, since internal reasoning chains are longer and pricier. [Edit] Its probably premature to argue without the above data, but if we assume tool use gives ~100% accuracy and reasoning-only ~90%, then that 10% gap might represent the loss in the probabilistic model: either from functional ambiguity in the model itself or symbolic ambiguity from tokenization?
pessimizer 1y ago
I just think that LLM calls are the new transistor. Transistors don't do much, but you build computers out of them. LLMs do a lot more than transistors. LLMs are very good at imitating moderate-length patterns. It can usually keep an apparently sensible conversation going with itself for at least a couple thousand words before it goes completely off the rails, although you never know exactly when it will go off the rails; it's very unlikely to be after the first sentence, far more likely to be after the twenty-first, and will never get past the 50th. If you inject novel input in periodically (such as reminding and clarifying prompts), you can keep the plate spinning longer. So some tricks work right now to extend the amount of time the thing can go before falling into the inevitable entropy that comes from talking to itself too long, and I don't think that we should assume that there won't ever be a way to keep the plate spinning forever. We may be able to do it practically (making it very unusual for them to fall apart), or somebody may come up with a way to make them provably resilient. I don't know if the current market leaders have any insight into how to do this, however. But I'm also sure that an LLM reaching for a calculator and injecting the correct answer into the context keeps that context useful for longer than if it hadn't.
sam0x17 1y ago
If you subscribe to extended mind theory and Merleau Ponty's brand of phenomenology, tools are just an extension of your cognitive process, and "shelling out" in this way is really to be expected of high intelligence, if not consciousness. Some would say it might even be a prerequisite for consciousness, that you need to be a being-in-the-world etc etc Not to say that GPT is conscious, in its current form I think it certainly isn't, but rather I would say reasoning is a positive development, not an embarrassing one I can't compute 297298*248 immediately in my head, and if I were to try it I'd have to hobble through a multiplicaion algorithm, in my head... it's quite simlar to what they're doing here, it's just they can wire it right into a real calculator instead of slowly running a shitty algo on wetware
- eikenberry 1y ago
  Heidegger ready-to-hand is another take on this same idea. Something I took to heart years ago and was a big part of my using and contributing to free software as much as possible. Proprietary software is a form of mind control along these lines of thought and I don't like that one bit.
- bonoboTP 1y ago
  Yeah humans have done this physically for very long. We have puny little teeth but have knives and butchering tools much better than any animal's teeth. We have little hair, but make clothes that can keep us warm in the arctic or even in space. We have an underdeveloped colon and digestive system, but instead we pre-digest the food by cooking it on fire. In some sense the stove is part of our digestive system, the jacket is part of our dermis (like the shell of a snail, except we build it through a different process), and we have external teeth in the form of utensils and stone tools. Now, ideally, the LLMs could also design their own tools, when they realize there is a recurring task that can be accomplished better and more reliably by coding up a tool.
meowface 1y ago
Almost everything in this seems incorrect.
gardnr 1y ago
I appreciate the insight in this post and I would argue that we need the right amount of loss to enable the next level. Trying to achieve "lossless representation" will be very expensive and may not bring the desired outcome. Humans build neurochemical bias networks specifically so we can discard information and still operate in diverse and dangerous environments.
xeckr 1y ago
For what it's worth, the brain also doesn't use its language centres to do arithmetic.
- antonvs 1y ago
  Right, this is something many people seem to miss. LLMs are at best similar to some module in the brain. A full intelligence is almost certainly going to require a mixture of models and a bunch of connections and architecture to tie it all together. There seems to be a bit of "if your only tool is a hammer" going on with the desire to have a single model do everything.
toobulkeh 1y ago
This is just pedantic noise. "Don't improve the model by using code gen" - problem "Write better architecture" - solution It's literally the same thing. Sure, OpenAI's branding of ChatGPT as a product with GPT-5 is confusing, because GPT-5 is both a MODEL and a PRODUCT (collection of models, including GPT-5). But does it matter?
bossyTeacher 1y ago
Not sure why people in the comments are trying to explain LLM behaviour using brain behaviour. We have been here before. Remember the brain heat engine analogies.
fudged71 1y ago
Huh? Integrating external tool calls for routine, deterministic operations in large language models is not a fallback or workaround but a deliberate, intelligent architectural choice that mirrors human adaptive expertise by combining efficient routine processing with flexible, innovative reasoning to handle novel challenges

63 points by QueensGambit 1y ago

Hi HN, OP here. I'd appreciate feedback from folks with deep model knowledge on a few technical claims in the essay. I want to make sure I'm getting the fundamentals right. 1. On o1's arithmetic handling: I claim that when o1 multiplies large numbers, it generates Python code rather than calculating internally. I don't have full transparency into o1's internals. Is this accurate? 2. On model stagnation: I argue that fundamental model capabilities (especially code generation) have plateaued, and that tool orchestration is masking this. Do folks with hands-on experience building/evaluating models agree? 3. On alternative architectures: I suggest graph transformers that preserve semantic meaning at the word level as one possible path forward. For those working on novel architectures - what approaches look promising? Are graph-based architectures, sparse attention, or hybrid systems actually being pursued seriously in research labs? Would love to know your thoughts!

Workaccount2 1y ago
I don't think HN is a place for fact checking your blog.
- Terr_ 1y ago
  On the other hand, "that's technically wrong" is an extraordinarily popular staple of online geek discussion. :p
lawlessone 1y ago
All i can say as someone sorta lay is that math isn't an LLM's strength. Having them defer calculations to calculators or python code seems better than it guessing that 1+1 = 2 because it's past data says 1+1 = 2
cpa 1y ago
I don't think 2 is true: when OpenAI model won a gold medal in the math olympiads, it did so without tools or web search, just pure inference. Such a feat definitely would not have happened with o1.
- MoltenMan 1y ago
  True, but aren't the math (and competitive programming) achievements a bit different? They're specific models heavily RL'd on competition math problems. Obviously still ridiculously impressive, but if you haven't done competition math or programming before it's much more memorization of techniques than you might expect and it's much easier to RL on.
- simonw 1y ago
  Yeah, I confirmed this at the time. Neither OpenAI nor Gemini used tools as part of their IMO gold medal performances. Here's OpenAI's tweet about this: https://twitter.com/SebastienBubeck/status/1946577650405056722 https://twitter.com/SebastienBubeck/status/19465776504050567... > Just to spell it out as clearly as possible: a next-word prediction machine (because that's really what it is here, no tools no nothing) just produced genuinely creative proofs for hard, novel math problems at a level reached only by an elite handful of pre‑college prodigies. My notes: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/19/openai-gold-medal-math-olympiad/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/19/openai-gold-medal-math... They DID use tools for the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) programming one though: https://twitter.com/ahelkky/status/1971652614950736194 https://twitter.com/ahelkky/status/1971652614950736194 > For OpenAI, the models had access to a code execution sandbox, so they could compile and test out their solutions. That was it though; no internet access.
  - emp17344 1y ago
    We still have next to no real information on how the models achieved the gold medal. It’s a little early to be confirming anything, especially when the main source is a Twitter thread initiated by a company known for “exaggerating” the truth.
    - 1y ago
simonw 1y ago
1 isn't true. o1 doesn't have access to a Python interpreter unless you explicitly grant it access. If you call the OpenAI API for o1 and ask it to multiply two large numbers it cannot use Python to help it. Try this: curl https://api.openai.com/v1/responses \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_API_KEY" \ -d '{ "model": "o1", "input": "Multiply 87654321 × 98765432", "reasoning": { "effort": "medium", "summary": "detailed" } }' Here's what I got back just now: https://gist.github.com/simonw/a6438aabdca7eed3eec52ed7df64eff0?permalink_comment_id=5821856 https://gist.github.com/simonw/a6438aabdca7eed3eec52ed7df64e... o1 correctly answered the multiplication by running a long multiplication process entirely through reasoning tokens.
- deleted 1y ago
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- alganet 1y ago
  I see this: > "tool_choice": "auto" > "parallel_tool_calls": true Can you remake the API call explicitly asking it to not perform any tool calls?
  - simonw 1y ago
    I'm doing that here. It only makes tool calls if you give it a JSON list of tools it can call. Those are its default settings whether or not there are tools configured. You can set tool_choice to the name of a specific tool in order to force it to use that tool. I added my comment here to show an example of an API call with Python enabled: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45686779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45686779 Update: Looks like you can add "tool_choice": "none" to prevent even tools you have configured from being called. https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/responses/create#responses-create-tool_choice https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/responses/cre...
    - alganet 1y ago
      There are three possible generic values for `tool_choice`: none, auto and required. Can you remake the call explicitly using the value `none`? Maybe it's not using Python, but it's using something else. I think it's a good test. If you're right, then the response shouldn't change. Update: `auto` is ambiguous. It doesn't say whether is picking from your selection of tools or the pool of all available tools. Explicit is better than implicit. I think you should do the call with `none`, it can't hurt and it can prove me wrong.
anonymoushn 1y ago
I don't really know what you mean by "preserve semantic meaning at the word level." The significant misunderstanding about tokenization present elsewhere in the article is concerning, given that the proposed path forward is to do with replacing tokenization somehow.
- remich 1y ago
  Right, words don't have semantic meaning on their own, that meaning is derived from surrounding context. "Cat" is both an animal and a bash command.
ACCount37 1y ago
Wrong on every count, basically. 1. You can enable or disable tool use in most APIs. Generally, tools such as web search and Python interpreter give models an edge. The same is true for humans, so, no surprise. At the frontier, model performance keeps climbing - both with tool use enabled and with it disabled. 2. Model capabilities keep improving. Frontier models of today are both more capable at their peak, and pack more punch for their weight, figuratively and literally. Capability per trained model weight and capability per unit of inference compute are both rising. This is reflected directly in model pricing - "GPT-4 level of performance" is getting cheaper over time. 3. We're 3 years into the AI revolution. If I had ten bucks for every "breakthrough new architecture idea" I've seen in a meanwhile, I'd be able to buy a full GB200 NVL72 with that. As a rule: those "breakthroughs" aren't that. At best, they offer some incremental or area-specific improvements that could find their way into frontier models eventually. Think +4% performance across the board, or +30% to usable context length for the same amount of inference memory/compute, or a full generational leap but only in challenging image understanding tasks. There are some promising hybrid approaches, but none that do away with "autoregressive transformer with attention" altogether. So if you want a shiny new architecture to appear out of nowhere and bail you out of transformer woes? Prepare to be disappointed.
- throwthrowrow 1y ago
  Question #1 was on the model's ability to handle arithmetic. The answer to question seems to be unrelated, at least to me: "you can enable or disable tool use in most APIs". The original question still stands: do recent LLMs have an inherent knowledge of arithmetic, or do they have to offload the calculation to some other non-LLM system?
  - ACCount37 1y ago
    The knowledge was never the bottleneck for that, not since the days of GPT-3. The ability to execute on it was. Which includes, among other things, the underappreciated metacognitive skill of "being able to decide when to do math quick and dirty, in one forward pass, and when to write it out explicitly and solve it step by step". Today's frontier LLMs can do that. A lot of training for "reasoning" is just training for "execute on your knowledge reliably". They usually can solve math problems with no tool calls. But they will tool call for more complex math when given an option to.
XenophileJKO 1y ago
Point 2 is 1000% not true, the models have both gotten better at the overall act of coding, but have also gotten WAY better at USING tools. This isn't tool orchestration frameworks, this is knowing how and when to use tools effectively and it is largely inside the model. I would also say this is a fundamental model capability. This improved think->act->sense loop that they now form, exponentially increases the possible utility of the models. We are just starting to see this with gpt-5 and the 4+ series of Claude models.
- emp17344 1y ago
  Yes, the models have gotten better at using tools because tech companies have poured an insane amount of money into improving tools and integrating them with LLMs. Is this because the models have actually improved, or because the tools and integration methods have improved? I don’t think anyone actually knows.
  - XenophileJKO 1y ago
    The models have improved. They are using "arbitrary tools" better.
    - emp17344 1y ago
      I don’t know what you mean, because arbitrary tools don’t integrate with LLMs in the first place. Are you referring to MCP?
  - remich 1y ago
    But, isn't improving tools and the LLM's integration with them improving the model? Caveat that we don't fully understand how human intelligence works, but with humans it's generally true that skills are not static or siloed. Improving in one area can generate dividends in others. It's like how some professional football players improve their games by taking ballet lessons. Two very different skills, but the incorporation of one improves the other as well as the whole. I would argue that narrowly focusing on LLM performance via benchmarks before tool use is incorporated is interesting, but not particularly relevant to whether they are transformative, or even useful, as products.
mirekrusin 1y ago
Reasoning model doesn't imply tool calling – those shouldn't be conflated. Reasoning just means more implicit chain-of-thought. It can be emulated by non reasoning model by explicitly constructing prompt to perform longer step by step thought process. With reasoning models it just happens implicitly, some models allow for control over reasoning effort with special tokens. Those models are simply fine tuned to do it themselves without explicit dialogue from the user. Tool calling happens primarily on the client side. Research/web access mode etc made available by some providers (based on tool calling that they handle themselves) is not a property of a model, can be enabled on any model. Nothing plateaued from where I'm standing – new models are being trained, releases happen frequently with impressive integration speed. New models outperform previous ones. Models gain multi modality etc. Regarding alternative architectures – there are new ones proposed all the time. It's not easy to verify all of them at scale. Some ideas that are extending current state of art architectures end up in frontier models - but it takes time to train so lag does exist. There are also a lot of improvements that are hidden from public by commercial companies.
Legend2440 1y ago
>I claim that when o1 multiplies large numbers, it generates Python code rather than calculating internally. I don't have full transparency into o1's internals. Is this accurate? Both reasoning and non-reasoning models may choose to use the Python interpreter to solve math problems. This isn't hidden from the user; it will show the interpreter ("Analyzing...") and you can click on it to see the code it ran. It can also solve math problems by working through them step-by-step. In this case it will do long multiplication using the pencil-and-paper method, and it will show its work.
mxkopy 1y ago
Not affiliated with anyone, but I think the likes of OptNet (differentiable constraint optimization) are soon going to play a role in developing AI with precise deductive reasoning. More broadly I think what we’re looking for at the end of the day, AGI, is going come about from a diaspora of methods capturing the diverse aspects of what we recognize as intelligence. ‘Precise deductive reasoning’ is one capability out of many. Attention isn’t all you need, neither is compression, convex programming, what have you. The perceived “smoothness” or “unity” of our intelligence is an illusion like virtual memory hiding cache, and building it is going to look a lot more like stitching these capabilities together than deriving some deep and elegant equation.
kgeist 1y ago
Try running local LLMs like Qwen3 yourself. They can calculate accurately in their reasoning traces even if you don't give them access to coding tools. In fact, even mid-range models (32b params) under 4-bit quantization can perform pretty well. No need to make guesses, you can try it yourself!

Terr_ 1y ago

> These are not model improvements. They're engineering workarounds for models that stopped improving. One might characterize it as an improvement in the document-style which the model operates upon. My favorite barely-a-metaphor is that the "AI" interaction is based on a hidden document that looks like a theater script, where characters User and Bot are having a discussion. Periodically, the make_document_longer(doc) function (the stateless LLM) is invoked to to complete more Bot lines. An orchestration layer performs the Bot lines towards the (real) user, and transcribes the (real) user's submissions into User dialogue. Recent improvements? Still a theater-script, but: 1. Reasoning - The Bot character is a film-noir detective with a constant internal commentary, not typically "spoken" to the User character and thus not "performed" by the orchestration layer: "The case was trouble, but I needed to make rent, and to do that I had to remember it was Georgia the state, not the country." 2. Tools - There are more stage-directions, such as "Bot uses [CALCULATOR] inputting [sqrt(5)*pi] and getting [PASTE_RESULT_HERE]". Regular programs are written to parse the script, run tools, and then replace the result. Meanwhile, the fundamental architecture and the make_document_longer(doc) haven't changed as much, hence the author's title of "not model improvement."*

QueensGambit 1y ago
Exactly. Both the theater script and code are metadata that manipulates entities: characters in a play or variables in memory. There's definitely abstract-level understanding emerging: that's why models can be trained on python, but write code in java. That could be instructions like pseudo-code or the hidden document/theater script you mentioned. That capability jump from GPT3 to o1 is real. But my point is: pure metadata manipulation has hit a ceiling or is moving at a crawling pace since o1. The breakthrough applications (like agentic AI) still depend on the underlying model's ability to generate accurate code. When that capability plateaus, all the clever orchestration on top of it plateaus too.
- Terr_ 1y ago
  Just to confirm, as this topic gets "very meta" with levels of indirection, it sounds like you mean the LLM appends a "fitting" document fragment like: This was an unusual task Bot wasn't sure how to solve directly. Bot decided it needed to execute a program: [CODE_START]foo(bar(baz())[CODE_END] Which resulted in [CODE_RESULT_PLACEHOLDER] This stage-direction is externally parsed, executed, and substituted, and then the LLM is called upon to generate Bot-character's next reaction. In terms of how this could go wrong, it makes me think of a meme: > Thinking quickly, Dave constructs a homemade megaphone, using only some string, a squirrel, and a megaphone.

cat-whisperer 1y ago

I use thinking with claude cod extensively. It’s same as reasoning they just name it differently. It definitely helps, sometimes it feels like they came up with original thoughts and ideas

esafak 1y ago
Claude Cod. That would be a neat addition to their portfolio :)
- remich 1y ago
  This just made me think of that wall-mounted singing fish. Someone should make a cursed version that connects to Claude.

daxfohl 1y ago

I've seen research that shows that starting with reasoning models, and fine-tuning to slowly remove the reasoning steps, allows you to bake the reasoning directly into the model weights in a strong sense. Here's a recent example, and you can see the digits get baked into a pentagonal prism in the weights, allowing accurate multi-digit multiplication without needing notes: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00184 https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00184. So, reasoning and tool use could be the first step, to collect a ton of training data to do something like this fine-tuning process.

nightmunnas 1y ago
This is what I deem to be more comparable to human reasoning, although in this case it happens at an extremely slow timescale. Ideally real reasoning would have an impact on the weights, although that would be practically impossible(very impractical with the current model architectures) and especially if the conversation is had with the broader public.
- daxfohl 1y ago
  Yeah, kind of. Though it seems like humans do some post-analysis on the reasoning and kind of "root cause" the path to the result. Fine tuning on the raw thought output seems like it could capture a ton of unnecessary noise. I don't know if it would be able to capture the "aha" moment and encode that alone in a way that makes sense.
QueensGambit 1y ago
That's interesting, though I wonder if what's "baked into the weights" is closer to intuition than reasoning. Once reasoning traces are distilled into weights, the model stops thinking through problems and starts pattern-matching answers. That feels more like a stochastic parrot with intuition than an analytical reasoner.
- daxfohl 1y ago
  I'd guess it works like any form of learning a subject. The better you have internalized the fundamentals, the better you can perform at higher level tasks. Though to that end, I wonder if the model "knows" that it "understands" the fundamentals better once it's been trained like this, or if when it has to do a large multiplication as part of a larger reasoning task, does it still break it down step by step.

skybrian 1y ago

The combination of LLM's and various other tools seems pretty powerful and it's the way industry is moving. Many combinations will be tried and whatever patterns work will be copied. LLM's and tools are co-evolving. I'm not sure why we should be dissatisfied with that?

ohadron 1y ago

> Each step moves further from "how do we build better models?" toward "how do we monetize the models we have?" I don't think OpenAI launching ChatGPT Apps and Atlas signals they're pivoting. It's just that when you raise that much money you must deploy it in any possible direction.

raincole 1y ago

It makes so little sense that it's hard to comment. > Unlike GPT-3, which at least attempted arithmetic internally (and often failed), o1 explicitly delegates computation to external tools. How is it a bad thing? Does the author really believe this is a bad thing? Even if we believe tech bros' most wild claim - AGI is around the corner - I still don't know why calling external tools makes an AGI less AGI. If you ask Terence Tao what 113256289421x89831475287 is I'm quite sure he'd "call external tools." Does it make him less a mathematician? Plus, this is not what people call "reasoning." The title: > Reasoning Is Not Model Improvement The content: > (opening with how o1 is calling external tools for arithmetic) ...anyway, whatever. I guess it's a Cunningham's Law thing. Otherwise it's a bit puzzling why someone knows nothing about a topic had to write an article to make everyone know how clueless they are.

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j45 1y ago

I wonder if the industry should be calling it simulated probabilistic reasoning vs the reasoning that deterministic software is able to reliably.

Legend2440 1y ago

This article is pretty much all wrong. Reasoning is not tool calling. Reasoning is about working through problems step-by-step. This is always going to be necessary for some problems (logic solving, puzzles, etc) because they have a known minimum time complexity and fundamentally require many steps of computation. Bigger models = more width to store more information. Reasoning models = more depth to apply more computation.

simonw 1y ago

There are several key points in this that I don't think are accurate. > When you ask o1 to multiply two large numbers, it doesn't calculate. It generates Python code, executes it in a sandbox, and returns the result. That's not true of the model itself, see my comment here which demonstrates it multiplying two large numbers via the OpenAI API without using Python: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45683113#45686295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45683113#45686295 On GPT-5 it says: > What they delivered barely moved the needle on code generation, the one capability that everything else depends on. I don't think that holds up. GPT-5 is wildly better at coding that GPT-4o was (and got even better with GPT-5-Codex). A lot of people have been ditching Claude for GPT-5 for coding stuff, and Anthropic held the throne for "best coding model" for well over a year prior to that. From the conclusion: > All [AI coding startups] betting on the same assumption: models will keep getting better at generating code. If that assumption is wrong, the entire market becomes a house of cards. The models really don't need to get better at generating code right now for the economic impact to be profound. If progress froze today we could still spend the next 12+ months finding new ways to get better results for code out of our current batch of models.

behnamoh 1y ago
> A lot of people have been ditching Claude for GPT-5 for coding stuff, and Anthropic held the throne for "best coding model" for well over a year prior to that. Even if GPT-5 was less capable of a coder than Claude, I'd still not use Claude because of its ridiculous quotas, context window restrictions, slowness, and Anthropic's pedantic stance on AI safety.
tptacek 1y ago
There's also the pretty simple observation that the ability to chain tool calls this way is itself a profound model improvement that occurred, in public mainstream foundation models, only a year ago.
QueensGambit 1y ago
OP here. Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Curious if you’ve measured o1’s accuracy and token cost with tool use enabled vs disabled? Wondering if python sandbox gives higher accuracy and lower cost, since internal reasoning chains are longer and pricier. [Edit] Its probably premature to argue without the above data, but if we assume tool use gives ~100% accuracy and reasoning-only ~90%, then that 10% gap might represent the loss in the probabilistic model: either from functional ambiguity in the model itself or symbolic ambiguity from tokenization?

pessimizer 1y ago

I just think that LLM calls are the new transistor. Transistors don't do much, but you build computers out of them. LLMs do a lot more than transistors. LLMs are very good at imitating moderate-length patterns. It can usually keep an apparently sensible conversation going with itself for at least a couple thousand words before it goes completely off the rails, although you never know exactly when it will go off the rails; it's very unlikely to be after the first sentence, far more likely to be after the twenty-first, and will never get past the 50th. If you inject novel input in periodically (such as reminding and clarifying prompts), you can keep the plate spinning longer. So some tricks work right now to extend the amount of time the thing can go before falling into the inevitable entropy that comes from talking to itself too long, and I don't think that we should assume that there won't ever be a way to keep the plate spinning forever. We may be able to do it practically (making it very unusual for them to fall apart), or somebody may come up with a way to make them provably resilient. I don't know if the current market leaders have any insight into how to do this, however. But I'm also sure that an LLM reaching for a calculator and injecting the correct answer into the context keeps that context useful for longer than if it hadn't.

sam0x17 1y ago

If you subscribe to extended mind theory and Merleau Ponty's brand of phenomenology, tools are just an extension of your cognitive process, and "shelling out" in this way is really to be expected of high intelligence, if not consciousness. Some would say it might even be a prerequisite for consciousness, that you need to be a being-in-the-world etc etc Not to say that GPT is conscious, in its current form I think it certainly isn't, but rather I would say reasoning is a positive development, not an embarrassing one I can't compute 297298*248 immediately in my head, and if I were to try it I'd have to hobble through a multiplicaion algorithm, in my head... it's quite simlar to what they're doing here, it's just they can wire it right into a real calculator instead of slowly running a shitty algo on wetware

eikenberry 1y ago
Heidegger ready-to-hand is another take on this same idea. Something I took to heart years ago and was a big part of my using and contributing to free software as much as possible. Proprietary software is a form of mind control along these lines of thought and I don't like that one bit.
bonoboTP 1y ago
Yeah humans have done this physically for very long. We have puny little teeth but have knives and butchering tools much better than any animal's teeth. We have little hair, but make clothes that can keep us warm in the arctic or even in space. We have an underdeveloped colon and digestive system, but instead we pre-digest the food by cooking it on fire. In some sense the stove is part of our digestive system, the jacket is part of our dermis (like the shell of a snail, except we build it through a different process), and we have external teeth in the form of utensils and stone tools. Now, ideally, the LLMs could also design their own tools, when they realize there is a recurring task that can be accomplished better and more reliably by coding up a tool.

meowface 1y ago

Almost everything in this seems incorrect.

gardnr 1y ago

I appreciate the insight in this post and I would argue that we need the right amount of loss to enable the next level. Trying to achieve "lossless representation" will be very expensive and may not bring the desired outcome. Humans build neurochemical bias networks specifically so we can discard information and still operate in diverse and dangerous environments.

xeckr 1y ago

For what it's worth, the brain also doesn't use its language centres to do arithmetic.

antonvs 1y ago
Right, this is something many people seem to miss. LLMs are at best similar to some module in the brain. A full intelligence is almost certainly going to require a mixture of models and a bunch of connections and architecture to tie it all together. There seems to be a bit of "if your only tool is a hammer" going on with the desire to have a single model do everything.

toobulkeh 1y ago

This is just pedantic noise. "Don't improve the model by using code gen" - problem "Write better architecture" - solution It's literally the same thing. Sure, OpenAI's branding of ChatGPT as a product with GPT-5 is confusing, because GPT-5 is both a MODEL and a PRODUCT (collection of models, including GPT-5). But does it matter?

bossyTeacher 1y ago

Not sure why people in the comments are trying to explain LLM behaviour using brain behaviour. We have been here before. Remember the brain heat engine analogies.

fudged71 1y ago

Huh? Integrating external tool calls for routine, deterministic operations in large language models is not a fallback or workaround but a deliberate, intelligent architectural choice that mirrors human adaptive expertise by combining efficient routine processing with flexible, innovative reasoning to handle novel challenges