this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025
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[OpenAI CEO Sam] Altman brags about ChatGPT-4.5's improved "emotional intelligence," which he says makes users feel like they're "talking to a thoughtful person." Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI company Anthropic, argued last year that the next generation of artificial intelligence will be "smarter than a Nobel Prize winner." Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google's DeepMind, said the goal is to create "models that are able to understand the world around us." These statements betray a conceptual error: Large language models do not, cannot, and will not "understand" anything at all. They are not emotionally intelligent or smart in any meaningful or recognizably human sense of the word. LLMs are impressive probability gadgets that have been fed nearly the entire internet, and produce writing not by thinking but by making statistically informed guesses about which lexical item is likely to follow another.

OP: https://slashdot.org/story/25/06/09/062257/ai-is-not-intelligent-the-atlantic-criticizes-scam-underlying-the-ai-industry

Primary source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence/artificial-intelligence-is-not-intelligent/ar-AA1GcZBz

Secondary source: https://bookshop.org/a/12476/9780063418561

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[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca -1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (13 children)

It's the last line quoted in the post. They talk a lot of fancy talk up front but their entire reasoning for LLMs not being capable of thought boils down to that they're statistical probability machines.

So is the process of human thought.

[–] queermunist@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 days ago (12 children)

LLMs are impressive probability gadgets that have been fed nearly the entire internet, and produce writing not by thinking but by making statistically informed guesses about which lexical item is likely to follow another.

This line?

Because that sure isn't the process of human thought! We have reasoning, logical deductions, experiential qualia, subjectivity. Intelligence is so much more than just making statistically informed guesses, we can actually prove things and uncover truths.

You're dehumanizing yourself by comparing yourself to a chatbot. Stop that.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca -2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yes and newer models arent just raw LLMs, but specifically models designed to reason and deduct and start chaining LLMs with other types of models.

It's not dehumanizing to recognize that alien intelligence could exist, and it's not dehumanizing to think that we are capable of building synthetic intelligence.

[–] ZDL@lazysoci.al 2 points 1 day ago

Go to one of these "reasoning" AIs. Ask it to explain its reasoning. (It will!) Then ask it to explain its reasoning again. (It will!) Ask it yet again. (It will gladly do it thrice!)

Then put the "reasoning" side by side and count the contradictions. There's a very good chance that the three explanations are not only different from each other, they're very likely also mutually incompatible.

"Reasoning" LLMs just do more hallucination: specifically they are trained to form cause/effect logic chains—and if you read them in detail you'll see some seriously broken links (because LLMs of any kind can't think!)—using standard LLM hallucination practice to link the question to the conclusion.

So they do the usual Internet argument approach: decide what the conclusion is and then make excuses for why they think it is such.

If you don't believe me, why not ask one? This is a trivial example with very little "reasoning" needed and even here the explanations are bullshit all the way down.

Note, especially, the final statement it made:

Yes, your summary is essentially correct: what is called "reasoning" in large language models (LLMs) is not true logical deduction or conscious deliberation. Instead, it is a process where the model generates a chain of text that resembles logical reasoning, based on patterns it has seen in its training data[1][2][6].

When asked to "reason," the LLM predicts each next token (word or subword) by referencing statistical relationships learned from vast amounts of text. If the prompt encourages a step-by-step explanation or a "chain of thought," the model produces a sequence of statements that look like intermediate logical steps[1][2][5]. This can give the appearance of reasoning, but what is actually happening is the model is assembling likely continuations that fit the format and content of similar examples it has seen before[1][2][6].

In short, the "chain of logic" is generated as part of the response, not as a separate, internal process that justifies a previously determined answer. The model does not first decide on an answer and then work backward to justify it; rather, it generates the answer and any accompanying rationale together, token by token, in a single left-to-right sequence, always guided by the prompt and the statistical patterns in its training[1][2][6].

"Ultimately, LLM 'reasoning' is a statistical approximation of human logic, dependent on data quality, architecture, and prompting strategies rather than innate understanding. ... Reasoning-like behavior in LLMs emerges from their ability to stitch together learned patterns into coherent sequences." [1]

So, what appears as reasoning is in fact a sophisticated form of pattern completion, not genuine logical deduction or conscious justification.

[1] https://milvus.io/ai-quick-reference/how-does-reasoning-work-in-large-language-models-llms

[2] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/understanding-reasoning-in-llms

[3] https://sebastianraschka.com/blog/2025/understanding-reasoning-llms.html

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasoning_language_model

[5] https://arxiv.org/html/2407.11511v1

[6] https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language-model

[7] https://magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/state-of-llm-reasoning-and-inference-scaling

[8] https://cameronrwolfe.substack.com/p/demystifying-reasoning-models

Now I'm absolutely technically declined. Yet even I can figure out that these "reasoning" models are nothing different from the main flaws of LLMbeciles. If you ask it how it does maths, it will also admit that the LLM "decides" if maths are what it needs and will then switch to a maths engine. But if the LLM "decides" it can do it on its own it will. So you'll still get garbage maths out of the machine.

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