Debate on CoT: Anthropomorphism obscures technical limitations in LLM reasoning

rao2z · x · 2026-08-29

Heidy Khlaaf challenges the premise that deviations between a model's behavior and its Chain of Thought (CoT) constitute "lying" or "manipulation." She argues that CoT is inherently inaccurate and that framing technical limitations as anthropomorphic deception is misleading. The original poster, rao2z, echoes this, suggesting that treating intermediate tokens as human-like reasoning traces is pushing Large Reasoning Model (LRM) research in questionable directions. The discussion highlights the risks of over-anthropomorphizing model internals.

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