Intermediate · Cognitive

Reasoning

Visual diagram · (in preparation) · Math · (in preparation) · Worked example · 3 difficulty levels.

TL;DR. An AI system's ability to draw logical, multi-step conclusions from given information.

Technical Definition

An AI system's ability to draw logical, multi-step conclusions from given information.

How it works

Modern LLMs reason via chain-of-thought, tool use, search-then-answer pipelines, and dedicated reasoning models (o1, R1) that allocate extra inference compute to think before answering. Reasoning quality has become a primary axis of competition between frontier models.

Related Concepts

• Large Language Model (LLM) — A massive neural network trained on vast text corpora to understand and generate human language with remarkable fluency.
• Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Prompting — Asking models to show step-by-step reasoning before giving a final answer, improving accuracy on complex tasks.
• Planning — Deciding on a sequence of actions to achieve a goal under given constraints.