Comment by killerstorm

What is "thinking"?

LLMs can do advanced math and coding, which involves logic, so they are definitely capable of using logic. Which is what most people call reasoning.

So "LLMs are incapable of reasoning, they are just pattern matchers" is wrong. A lot of logic _is_ pattern matching, BTW. Like, syllogisms - deductive reasoning - do you think LLMs are incapable of that?

The thing you're referring to is that LLMs are trained to produce an answer which a human would like, i.e. they aim to produce plausible rather than correct answers.

So it's not so much a mental deficit as a different goal. Trusting LLM blindly is definitely dangerous, but dismissing it as useless for anything by code is rather wrong.

Pattern matching is hardly what distinguishes human from LLM - if you ask somebody a question about policy, for examples, chances are they'd just recite something they heard somewhere, never really thinking about it from first principles.