Well, the model is based on llama-8b, which is quite bad at reasoning. Reasoning (or things that look and quack like reasoning) is more the domain of 70B+ models, and some of the newer 7B models.

The model is doing well on many reasoning tasks, what they are doing is a massive step up from llama-8b. But it still makes some silly mistakes. I bet if you did the same finetuning procedure with quen-7B or llama-70B as a starting point you would get a quite competent model

Of course there’s no actual reasoning.

Is there something more than prediction going on? I'd like to understand why there would be studies like this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.02477 if it's all just prediction. Are there some algorithms that are called "reasoning", that are somewhere between prediction and full-blown reasoning?

My guess is the framing in that paper was chosen to be provocative. The authors surely understand deep neural networks neither reason nor recite as we understand it in humans.

In any case, the conclusion was decidedly against reasoning.