Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is sort of amazing that it works, and no one knows why, but empirically speaking it is undeniable that it does work. The IMO result was achieved without any tool calls to a formal proof system. I agree that is a much more plausible-sounding approach. https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/google-deepmind-earns-gol...
Surely we do know why - reinforcement learning for reasoning. These systems are trained to generate reasoning steps that led to verified correct conclusions during training. No guarantees how they'll perform on different problems of course, but in relatively narrow closed domains like math and programming, it doesn't seem surprising that when done at scale there are similar enough problems where similar reasoning log…
Re: Is chain-of-thought AI reasoning a mirage?
#191We don't know why that is sufficient to enable the models to develop the capability, and we don't know what they are actually doing under the hood when they employ the capability.