The Illusion of Diminishing Returns: Measuring Long Horizon Execution in LLMs

Research shows that large language models' performance on short tasks may underestimate their capabilities, as small improvements in single-step accuracy lead to exponential gains in handling longer tasks. The study reveals that larger models excel at execution over many steps, though they suffer from 'self-conditioning' where previous errors increase the likelihood of future mistakes, which can be mitigated through 'thinking' mechanisms.