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There is a lot of debate about the "cognitive" capabilities of LLMs and LLM-based chatbots, like ChatGPT. It's common to see statements like "these models just apply statistical pattern matching" a...
#2: Post edited
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pbloem
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2024-05-08T16:40:23Z (7 months ago)
#1: Initial revision
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pbloem
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2024-05-08T16:31:24Z (7 months ago)
Do Large Language Models "reason"?
There is a lot of debate about the "cognitive" capabilities of LLMs and LLM-based chatbots, like ChatGPT. It's common to see statements like "these models just apply statistical pattern matching" and "they have no concept of the world." On the other hand, they are clearly very able to follow simple instructions, and manipulate things like code very effectively. Is there currently a scientific consensus on whether large language models are capable of reasoning? I'm looking for hard science, backed up by theory or experiment, not simple assertions. If there is no consensus, what are the main results pointing in the different directions? This most likely depends on how "reasoning" is defined, in which case, I'm interested in any answers for any specific definition of reasoning. It also depends on the model, of course. I'm interested in whether LLMs are capable of reasoning _in principle_, rather than on average. That is, if most LLMs don't reason, but one particular model does (because of, say, the amount of training data), then the answer is "yes".