Reasoning Models and Planning - with Rao Kambhampati (Arizona State)

The Information Bottleneck · Apr 29, 2026 · 1h 11m · transcript

We sat down with Rao Kambhampati, a Professor of CS at Arizona State University and former President of AAAI, to talk about reasoning models: what they are, when they work, and when they break.

Rao has been working on planning and decision-making since long before deep learning, which makes him one of the most grounded voices on what today's reasoning systems actually do. We start with definitions of what reasoning is, why planning is the hard subset of it, and what changed when systems like o1 and DeepSeek R1 moved the verifier from inference into post-training. From there we get into where…