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Here is how GPT self-described LLM reasoning when I asked about it: - LLMs don’t “reason” in the symbolic, step‑by‑step sense that humans or logic engines
by dkersten 1y ago
Here is how GPT self-described LLM reasoning when I asked about it:
- LLMs don’t “reason” in the symbolic, step‑by‑step sense that humans or logic engines do. They don’t manipulate abstract symbols with guaranteed consistency.
- What they do have is a statistical prior over reasoning traces: they’ve seen millions of examples of humans doing step‑by‑step reasoning (math proofs, code walkthroughs, planning text, etc.).
- So when you ask them to “think step by step,” they’re not deriving logic — they’re imitating the distribution of reasoning traces they’ve seen.
This means:
- They can often simulate reasoning well enough to be useful.
- But they’re not guaranteed to be correct or consistent.
That at least sounds consistent with what I’ve been trying to say and what I’ve observed.