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Jun 27, 2023

Nature Human Behaviour (2023)Cite this article

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Analogical reasoning is a hallmark of human intelligence, as it enables us to flexibly solve new problems without extensive practice. By using a wide range of tests, we demonstrate that GPT-3, a large-scale artificial intelligence language model, is capable of solving difficult analogy problems at a level comparable to human performance.

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Holyoak, K.J. in Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning (eds Holyoak, K. J. & Morrison, R. G.) 234–259 (Oxford Univ. Press, 2012). A book chapter that summarizes work in cognitive science on analogical reasoning.

Brown, T. et al. Language models are few-shot learners. In Adv. Neural Information Processing Systems 33 (eds Larochelle, H. et al.) 1877–1901 (Curran Associates, 2020). This paper describes GPT-3, the AI system that was evaluated in the present work.

Raven, J. C. Progressive Matrices: A Perceptual Test of Intelligence, Individual Form (Lewis Raven, 1938). A visual analogy problem set that is commonly used as a test of problem-solving skills.

Lake, B. M. et al. Building machines that learn and think like people. Behav. Brain Sci. 40, E253 (2017). A review and perspective that characterizes some limitations of deep learning systems.

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Mitchell, M. Abstraction and analogy-making in artificial intelligence. Ann. NY Acad. Sci. 1505, 79–101 (2021). A review that summarizes work in AI on analogical reasoning.

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Lu, H., Ichien, N. & Holyoak, K. J. Probabilistic analogical mapping with semantic relation networks. Psychol. Rev. 129, 1078 (2022). An example of work that combines deep learning with structured reasoning operations.

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This is a summary of: Webb, T. et al. Emergent analogical reasoning in large language models. Nat. Hum. Behav. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01659-w (2023).

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Large-scale AI language systems display an emergent ability to reason by analogy. Nat Hum Behav (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01671-0

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Published: 04 August 2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01671-0

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