[gwern]

> We're not talking about answering more slowly though. Nobody would care if it answered these questions correctly but slower.

Yes, we are, because it is a feedforward net with no recurrency or adaptive computation. Its responses are equivalent to your System I responses emitted with no time to think. Whereas if it is equipped with mechanisms like retrieval, which would put facts into the context, then that is more analogous to giving you a few seconds to response before flunking you: you get time to pull things into your short-term & working memory and cogitate them. And as mentioned, it does fine at answering B-is-A if the relevant A-is-B fact is in its working memory.

> The discussion points out that this would often yield very strange and incorrect statements being fed to the model.

They're not strange if they are fed en masse, nor are they 'incorrect'. A reversed string is not 'wrong'. It is just a reversed string. (If you look at something in a mirror or upside down, it's not 'incorrect'. It's just in a mirror or upside down.)