Personally I’m of the opinion that the lack of reasoning capacity in LLMs is _total_… meaning an LLM doesn’t reason at all, in any sense, which is precisely why

Personally I’m of the opinion that the lack of reasoning capacity in LLMs is _total_… meaning an LLM doesn’t reason at all, in any sense, which is precisely why comparing its capacity for reasoning to an autistic savant is so very flawed and, if you think on it, rather inhumane. The character of Raymond (and the real human who inspired him) was absolutely capable of rich and meaningful reasoning, but due to a physical injury to the brain had sacrificed wide reasoning breadth the rest of us take for granted in favor of narrow reasoning depth we can scarcely imagine. The LLM isn’t wide or narrow, shallow or deep… it’s just got such an expansive model of the frequency in which the tokens in its training corpus appear that it can, frequently enough to be compelling, give us back a simulacrum of sufficient apparent reasonableness that the fact it contains absolutely zero novel reasoning whatsoever goes unnoticed by us (usually because we’re asking it a question we don’t really know the answer to, while also having a pretty poor internal model of just how many people contributed statistically identical questions and actually reasoned answers to those questions in the training corpus). BTW, if we do ever develop a viable standardized test for actual reasoning capacity I’ll lay my money right now that not a single LLM (ever) passes it.