978: A Post-Transformer Architecture Crushes Sudoku (Transformers Solve ~0%)

An episode of the Super Data Science: ML & AI Podcast with Jon Krohn podcast, hosted by Jon Krohn, titled "978: A Post-Transformer Architecture Crushes Sudoku (Transformers Solve ~0%)" was published on March 27, 2026 and runs 10 minutes.

March 27, 2026 ·10m · Super Data Science: ML & AI Podcast with Jon Krohn

Summary

A game millions of people solve over morning coffee is exposing a fundamental weakness in today’s most powerful AI models. In this Five-Minute Friday, Jon Krohn breaks down Pathway’s new Sudoku Extreme benchmark, roughly 250,000 of the hardest Sudoku puzzles available and why leading LLMs like o3-mini, DeepSeek-R1, and Claude 3.7 Sonnet scored effectively zero percent, while Pathway’s post-transformer BDH architecture achieved 97.4% accuracy at a fraction of the cost. Listen to the episode to find out what BDH is doing differently, why Sudoku performance matters far beyond puzzles, and what this means for the future of AI reasoning. Additional materials: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.superdatascience.com/978⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Interested in sponsoring a SuperDataScience Podcast episode? Email [email protected] for sponsorship information.

Episode Description