Error Hunting Season: Why Pessimism Makes LLMs Smarter at Math
Opening — Why this matters now Reasoning is the new GPU. Since OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1 redefined the capabilities frontier, every lab is racing to stretch LLMs into long‑horizon, open‑form reasoning. But there’s a recurring bottleneck no amount of parameter scaling has fixed: LLMs remain surprisingly bad at noticing their own mistakes. This is more than an academic annoyance. For businesses deploying agentic systems in finance, logistics, engineering, and compliance, every hallucinated proof or mis‑classified justification becomes an operational, regulatory, or reputational risk. As LLMs attempt longer tasks, the cost of not catching small errors compounds. ...