Podcasts · Super Data Science: ML & AI Podcast with Jon Krohn

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

27 Mar 2026 · 11 min

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

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Links in the notes 1

• https://www.superdatascience.com/978