In particular, researchers have been exploring the extent to which language models can reason about language itself. For some in the linguistic community, language models not only don’t have reasoning abilities, they can’t. The researchers put a number of large language models, or LLMs, through a gamut of linguistic tests—including, in one case, having the LLM generalize the rules of a made-up language. Infinite ComplexityOne challenge of giving language models a rigorous linguistic test is making sure they don’t already know the answers. To avoid this, Beguš and his colleagues created a linguistic test in four parts.