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arXiv · 2502.10934

Fundamental Principles of Linguistic Structure are Not Represented by o3

Elliot Murphy·Evelina Leivada·Vittoria Dentella·Fritz Gunther·Gary Marcus
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Abstract

A core component of a successful artificial general intelligence would be the rapid creation and manipulation of grounded compositional abstractions and the demonstration of expertise in the family of recursive hierarchical syntactic objects necessary for the creative use of human language. We evaluated the recently released o3 model (OpenAI; o3-mini-high) and discovered that while it succeeds on some basic linguistic tests relying on linear, surface statistics (e.g., the Strawberry Test), it fails to generalize basic phrase structure rules; it fails with comparative sentences involving semantically illegal cardinality comparisons ('Escher sentences'); its fails to correctly rate and explain acceptability dynamics; and it fails to distinguish between instructions to generate unacceptable semantic vs. unacceptable syntactic outputs. When tasked with generating simple violations of grammatical rules, it is seemingly incapable of representing multiple parses to evaluate against various possible semantic interpretations. In stark contrast to many recent claims that artificial language models are on the verge of replacing the field of linguistics, our results suggest not only that deep learning is hitting a wall with respect to compositionality (Marcus 2022), but that it is hitting [a [stubbornly [resilient wall]]] that cannot readily be surmounted to reach human-like compositional reasoning simply through more compute.

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Elliot Murphy, Evelina Leivada, Vittoria Dentella, Fritz Gunther, Gary Marcus. 2025-02-15. Fundamental Principles of Linguistic Structure are Not Represented by o3. https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.10934

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