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Don't be fooled–LLMs don't reason

75 points · 159 comments · leopoldj

  1. kazinator · · focus · HN ↗
    > The gains have proved real, above all in mathematics and coding. But unlike AlphaGo’s search, this does not introduce a genuinely separate reasoning mechanism: The intermediate reasoning is still produced by the same next-token prediction process, iterated for longer before the model commits to an answer.

    But aren't external tools used, which implement hard reasoning? Like in the case of mathematics proof work, external theorem provers?

    The LLM is literally not doing "thinking"; it's just throwing shit at a theorem proving wall, until some of it sticks.

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