[crackalamoo]

The recent Apple paper seemed pretty flawed. Anthropic/Open Philanthropy did a rebuttal paper, The Illusion of the Illusion of Thinking.

> Do they reason? No. (Before you complain, please first define reason).

Defining reasoning is the problem. No, they don't reason in the same way as humans. But they seem to be able to go through reasoning steps in some important way. It's like asking if submarines swim.

[voidhorse]

I completely agree. The difference is, the utility of the submarine and its sales strategy did not depend on convincing human beings that it does swim like them.

The opposite is true of LLMs. Much of the sales pitch of these companies is that these things are capable of some form of reasoning that is in 1:1 correspondence with human reason. Not true. That's what makes this whole segment of the industry snake oil. It's not complete bunk because they do have some utility, but these companies know what they are doing when they use the term reason in all their marketing and papers. They are, in fact, trying to sell you the submarine because it can "swim".