They are highly effective pattern matchers. You change the pattern, it won't work. I don't remember who, but most likely @tszzl (roon), commented on x that they still trained the traditional way, and there is no test time compute (TTC) or Montecarlo Tree search (like Alpha Go) in o1 or o3. If that is true, then it's still predicting the next word based on it's training data. Likely to follow the most probable path - which comes directly from the training itself - even for the slight variations. Encouragingly, if TTC hasnt been explored, there is a long runway for performance improvements.
The other reason this seems hard to guess is because we don't know how much of what we are asking is in the training data. It would perform on some tasks, while fail at others even though those are similar.