  GPT-4 was released in March 2023 to wide acclaim, marking a very substantial
improvement across the board over GPT-3.5 (OpenAI's previously best model,
which had powered the initial release of ChatGPT). However, despite the
genuinely impressive improvement, there are good reasons to be highly skeptical
of GPT-4's ability to reason. This position paper discusses the nature of
reasoning; criticizes the current formulation of reasoning problems in the NLP
community, as well as the way in which LLM reasoning performance is currently
evaluated; introduces a small collection of 21 diverse reasoning problems; and
performs a detailed qualitative evaluation of GPT-4's performance on those
problems. Based on this analysis, the paper concludes that, despite its
occasional flashes of analytical brilliance, GPT-4 at present is utterly
incapable of reasoning.
