Small neural programs fail simple tasks; researcher says test-time compute is unavoidable
yuntiandeng · x · 2026-09-22
- Researcher yuntiandeng reports months of experiments with small neural programs: even seemingly simple tasks aren't solved reliably.
- In May, he tried compiling a function to solve the strawberry problem — it failed, and finetuning didn't fix it.
- His conclusion: reliably solving even simple tasks likely requires the same ingredients that helped LLMs — test-time compute and tool use.
Related event: Small neural programs struggle with even trivially simple tasks(2 posts)→
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