Melanie Mitchell on whether LLMs truly reason or just mimic it
stevenstrogatz · x · 2026-08-22
The latest episode of Quanta Magazine's 'The Joy of Why' features computer scientist Melanie Mitchell discussing the nature of LLMs: when an LLM answers a question, is it actually reasoning like a human, or simply producing text that resembles reasoning? Janna Levin retweeted, suggesting that machine cognition might be better understood as an 'alien' intelligence rather than an emulation of human cognition.
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