LLMs vs PFNs: Why ChatGPT-style AI Struggles with Spreadsheets.
LLMs taught us something useful: knowing language isn’t the same as learning from data. They can read a table, but as columns grow they struggle, their wins on famous datasets are often memory, and harmless changes shift their answers.
PFNs were built for exactly the job LLMs find hard. They practise on endless synthetic tables until learning from a table is second nature, and it shows: top accuracy on small-to-medium datasets, answers in seconds, and results that stay put.
The lesson is simple: use LLMs for words and code, and use PFNs like TabPFN when you need predictions from tables.