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Why “AI Can’t Reason” Is a Bias

We humans are proud creatures

Rafe Brena, Ph.D.
TDS Archive
Published in
9 min readDec 12, 2024

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Image by the author using ChatGPT

Recently, the controversy about whether or not AI can reason has heated up. OpenAI’s o1 model, released a few months ago, was welcomed with a mix of reactions, ranging from “It’s just smoke and mirrors” to “A new paradigm of AI.”

AI’s reasoning capabilities (or lack thereof) appear to strike a sensitive chord in many of us. I suspect that admitting an AI can “reason” is perceived as a hit on human pride, as reasoning wouldn’t be exclusive to humans.

In the nineteenth century, arithmetic was considered an intellectual prowess (hey, when have you seen a cow add together two numbers?). Still, we had to get used to using calculators that were way more capable than us.

I have seen shocking statements going from “We are about to achieve Artificial General Intelligence” or “AI got to the level of a PhD” to radical dismissals of the reasoning capabilities of AI, like “Apple Calls Bullshit On The AI Revolution.”

In other articles, I have commented on how nonsensical the AGI claims made by fans of Elon Musk. In this piece, I examine the opposite end of the spectrum: people who claim AI can’t reason at all.

Gary Marcus, one of the most outspoken AI denialists (I don’t call them…

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TDS Archive
TDS Archive

Published in TDS Archive

An archive of data science, data analytics, data engineering, machine learning, and artificial intelligence writing from the former Towards Data Science Medium publication.

Rafe Brena, Ph.D.
Rafe Brena, Ph.D.

Written by Rafe Brena, Ph.D.

AI expert, writepreneur, and futurologist. I was in AI way before it became cool.

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