Comment by claytongulick

> LLMs do reason

No, they don't.

They are token predictors that use statistical techniques to emit the randomly weighted next most likely token given the previous token list.

The result is a strange mimic of human reasoning, because the tokens it predicts are trained on strings that were produced by humans that were reasoning, but that's not the same thing.

Human cognition is complex and poorly understood, and the nature of the mind is an area of study almost as old as consciousness itself. We don't know exactly how it works, or what its exact relationship to the brain is, but we do know that it is not a simple token predictor.

LLMs, by their very nature are constrained to the concept of language and the relationship between existing words in a corpus. This is a box they can not escape.

Modern neuroscience suggests that the human brain is much more vast than that, and in many ways looks like it is constrained by language, but certainly not limited to it.