Is AI really thinking and reasoning — or just pretending to?

AI companies claim that their models are capable of genuine reasoning.

The big question is: Is that true? The stakes are high, because the answer will inform how everyone from your mom to your government should — and should not — turn to AI for help.

The best answer will be unsettling to both the hard skeptics of AI and the true believers.

It would be pretty easy for o1 to just make it sound like it’s reasoning; after all, its training data is rife with examples of that.

Besides, when OpenAI built the o1 model, it made some changes from the previous ChatGPT model but did not dramatically overhaul the architecture.

Other experts are more bullish on reasoning models.

John Sutter : Skeptics say AI models are doing some meta-mimicry.

He says they're getting better at a wide range of tasks that humans would call reasoning tasks.

Sutter says the models are pairing some memorization with some reasoning.

But skeptics say it’s not going to have a big impact on the world or artificial superintelligence is far away.