Why Large Language Models Fail at Tabular Prediction

Large language models fundamentally fail at tabular data prediction due to a critical inability to handle high-dimensional data—their accuracy degrades as data dimensionality increases, unlike classical ML methods—making specialized tabular foundation models necessary for enterprise analytics workloads. This finding has significant strategic implications: organizations should not expect general-purpose LLMs to replace traditional ML pipelines for predictive analytics on structured data, and IT leaders must maintain hybrid ML stacks combining both LLMs and classical methods based on use case requirements. The gap between LLM capabilities on text versus tables represents a fundamental architectural limitation rather than a training or tuning issue, requiring distinct tool selection strategies across the enterprise.