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These things are just statistical language models, aren't they? To the extent that when people reason or plan and then verbalize those plans, they tend to leave certain trajectories through language space, a statistical model could presumably reproduce similar, plausible sounding narratives. Doesn't mean that any kind of agency ever actually thought about those plans though, in the way that a person would.

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"plausible sounding" is probably the best two word summary of LLM output. A good one word summary might be "bullshit".

I relied on GPT4 to learn linear algebra. I had a text book and GPT4. One difference is the text book was sometimes wrong (and GPT4 is the one that spotted the error in the book). If it is "bullshit", it's very helpful bullshit.

When I ask GPT4 to write some code to perform a specific task, and it does so, and the code works and correctly performs the task, is that bullshit?

It's true that LLMs are not reliable enough to trust blindly, the same applies to humans.

> To the extent that when people reason or plan and then verbalize those plans

This is a large and dubious assumption. Most of what humans do require step coordination, but almost none of it is a result of explicit planning or verbalization.

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