person
Subbarao Kambhampati
ASU professor; 'LLMs Can't Plan' advocate
ASU computer science professor and former AAAI president who has been the most consistent senior academic voice arguing LLMs cannot plan, reason, or self-verify in the formal senses required for AGI.
Profile
expertise
Deep technical
Sustained peer-reviewed contribution to ML, alignment, interpretability, or safety techniques. Could review a frontier paper.
Arizona State professor. Long publication record on planning and reasoning. Vocal critic of LLM 'planning' claims; fellow of AAAI, ACM, AAAS.
recognition
Field-leading
Widely known inside the AI and AI-safety community. Appears repeatedly in top venues, podcasts, or governance forums. Not a household name to outsiders.
Recurring podcast and panel guest. Recognised within AI research. Less mainstream press.
vintage
Symbolic era
Career started in the GOFAI / expert-systems / early-rationalist period. Vinge's 1993 Singularity, MIRI founded 2000, Bostrom and Yudkowsky writing.
Arizona State professor since 1992. Planning-and-reasoning frame is symbolic-era; LLM critique runs on top.
Hand-classified. See the board for the criteria and the full grid.
Strategy positions
AI skepticendorses
AGI risk narratives overstated; real harms are mundane and currentArgues autoregressive LLMs cannot plan or reason in any formal sense; advocates LLM-Modulo frameworks where LLMs are combined with symbolic verifiers.
Auto-regressive LLMs cannot, by themselves, do planning or self-verification. They are approximate knowledge sources, not reasoners.
When you obfuscate the names of actions and objects in planning problems, GPT-4's performance plummets.
Closest strategy neighbours
by jaccard overlapOther people whose strategy tags overlap with Subbarao Kambhampati's. Overlap is on tag identity, not stance; opposites can show up if they reference the same tags.
Record last updated 2026-04-25.