About whether OpenAI o1's chain of thought is genuine reasoning.
Has this happened?
Yes 34 (29%)Not sure 50 (42%)No 34 (29%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether OpenAI o1's chain of thought is genuine reasoning.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Again its not reasoning.
Reasoning would imply that it can figure out stuff without being trained in it.
The chain of thought is basically just a more accurate way to map input to output. But its still a map, i.e forward only.
If an LLM coud reason, you should be able to ask it a question about how to make a bicycle frame from scratch with a small home cnc with limited work area and it should be able to iterate on an analysis of the best way to put it together, using internet to look up available parts and make decisions on optimization.
No LLM can do that or even come close, because there are no real feedback loops, because nobody knows how to train a network like that.