What is "reasoning" if not a sequence of tokens, the latter depending on the former in some way? I'd like to offer up 3 links that might help us understand where the "reasoning" of LLMs is only kindasorta reasoning:
• https://logicalintelligence.com/kona-ebms-energy-based-models • https://github.com/SkyworkAI/Matrix-Game/tree/main/Matrix-Game-2 • https://github.com/facebookresearch/vjepa2 The 1st one isn't quite like the other 2. But it's in the same vein, I think. There's some kind of something to be said about cumulative puzzles or meta-games. But I don't know quite what I'm trying to say. Although I loathe the term, Systemic Games <https://the-artifice.com/systemic-games-philosophy/> comes to mind. Reasoning engines have (at least) 2 modes, maybe akin to Kahneman's systems 1&2, where some input simply clicks or doesn't and is tossed away, but other inputs *modify* the lattice ... change the game. I say "at least" because there's a distinction between something like self-modifying code - where an execution can modify, add, or delete axioms or even the language - and "emergent play" where nothing fundamental changes, but one plays games atop or within the base game. So I guess there are at least 3 modes. All 3 are appropriately called "reasoning". But along with the gist of Hullman's post, failing to distinguish them is lazy. But we need generalized, non-jargonal nicknames for them, otherwise every mention requires a detailed glossary ... or perhaps an entire, pickled runtimeworldclosure, attached to every message passed. On 5/14/26 8:54 PM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/05/14/as/ <https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/05/14/as/> "Previously it didn’t feel like such a crime to talk about intelligence or learning in machines because nothing really worked that well, so the labels were clearly aspirational. But now it’s much easier to believe the simulacra. And so it becomes harder to tell when we are using human-oriented terms as a predictive convenience versus a scientific claim versus a marketing device." "Too much casualness with words is unscientific. There was no good reason in the first place to call the token sequences a model produces when we ask it to “explain its reasoning” reasoning, other than that’s what we wish we could see."
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