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Do LLMs really reason?

Samuel Hammond · 10 Jun 2025 · secondbest.ca

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  1. The success of LLMs can thus be seen as vindicating semantic inferentialism against earlier, symbolic approaches to AI that tried and failed to explicate the rules of ordinary language using formal logic.
  2. Consistent with the Kantian hypothesis, reasoning models automatically gain greater autonomy, self-consistency and long-horizon planning ability for free.
  3. It follows that a true AGI with full, human-level autonomy is inconceivable in the Kantian sense without also gaining our recognition as a moral subject.