Again, I've had this exact experience with people many times as well, so again I don't think this in itself is any kind of indication of whether or not LLMs are all that different from humans in this regard. The point is not that there aren't things missing from LLMs, but that I don't find the claim that this behaviour shows how different they are to be at all convincing.
My experience is that people do not appear naturally generalise reasoning techniques very well unless - possibly - if they are trained at doing that (possibly, because I'm not convinced that even most of those of us with significantly above average intelligence generalise reasoning nearly as well as we'd like to think).
Most people seem to learn not by being taught a new technique and then "automatically applying it", but being taught a new technique and then being made to repetitively practice that technique by being prompted step by step until they've learnt to apply it separate from the process of following the steps, and tend to perform really poorly and make lots of mistakes when doing it by instruction.
> You can't remind them they learned this or that when learning to do sums and to use it again in this context, as you would with a human, at the moment that flat out doesn't work.
I don't know what you're trying to say here. Mentioning a technique to ChatGPT and telling it to go through it step by step is not flawless but it often does work. E.g. I just tested by asking GPT4 for a multiplication method and then asked it to use it on two numbers I provided and show its working, and it did just fine. At the same time, doing this with humans often requires a disturbingly high level of step by step prompting (having a child, I've been through a torturous amount of this). I won't suggest ChatGPT is as good as following instructions as people, yet, but most people are also really awfully horrible at following instructions.
