No reasoning is about applying rules of logic consistently, so if you only do it some of the time, that's not reasoning.
If I roll a die and only _sometimes_ it returns the correct answer to a basic arithmetic question, this is the exact reason why we don't say a die is doing arithmetic.
Even worse in the case of LLMs, where it's not caused by pure chance, but also training bias and hallucinations.
You can claim nobody knows the exact definition of reasoning, maybe there are some edges which aren't clearly defined because they're part of Philosophy, but applying rules of logic consistently is not something you just don't always do and still call it reasoning.
Also, LLMs are generally incapable of saying they don't know something, cannot know something, can't do something, etc. They would rather try and hallucinate. When it does that, it's not reasoning. And you also can't explain to an LLM how to figure out it doesn't know something, and then actually say it doesn't know and not make stuff up. If it was capable of reasoning you should be able to convince it using _reason_, to do exactly that.
If I roll a die and only _sometimes_ it returns the correct answer to a basic arithmetic question, this is the exact reason why we don't say a die is doing arithmetic.
Even worse in the case of LLMs, where it's not caused by pure chance, but also training bias and hallucinations.
You can claim nobody knows the exact definition of reasoning, maybe there are some edges which aren't clearly defined because they're part of Philosophy, but applying rules of logic consistently is not something you just don't always do and still call it reasoning.
Also, LLMs are generally incapable of saying they don't know something, cannot know something, can't do something, etc. They would rather try and hallucinate. When it does that, it's not reasoning. And you also can't explain to an LLM how to figure out it doesn't know something, and then actually say it doesn't know and not make stuff up. If it was capable of reasoning you should be able to convince it using _reason_, to do exactly that.
However, you