Can Large Language Models Reason and Plan?

A version appears in the Annals of The New York Academy of Sciences: https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.15125 Their seeming versatility has however led many researchers to wonder whether they can also do well on planning and reasoning tasks typically associated with System 2 competency. Nothing in the training and use of LLMs would seem to suggest remotely that they can do any type of principled reasoning (which, as we know, often involves computationally Despite this, the "Large Language Models are Zero-Shot hard inference/search). What LLMs are good insert-your-reasoning-task " has almost become a meme at is a form of universal approximate retrieval. This means that LLMs can't even So, are these n-gram models on steroids really capable of guarantee memorizing complete answers, something that planning and reasoning?