What It Means for an LLM to Reason
What reasoning means for a language model, what o1 and DeepSeek R1 added, and why evaluating reasoning requires looking at steps, cost and failure modes.
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The ideas to retain
1. What "reasoning" means for a human
In cognitive psychology, reasoning is a deliberate process that allows people to solve problems outside the patterns they already know. It differs from pattern recognition—which is fast,…
2. What LLMs can do that looks like reasoning
LLMs can perform actions that, in practical terms, produce outputs similar to human reasoning in many contexts.
3. The birth of reasoning models: OpenAI o1
In September 2024, OpenAI released o1, the first model explicitly designed to "think before answering." The difference from earlier models was not simply model size or training data, but…
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