Causality in the time of LLMs: Round table discussion results of CLeaR 2023

The field of machine learning and AI has witnessed remarkable breakthroughs with the emergence of LLMs, which have also sparked a lively debate in the causal community. As researchers in this field, we are interested in exploring how LLMs relate to causality research, and how we can leverage the technology to advance it. In the second conference of Causal Learning and Reasoning (CLeaR), 2023, we held a round table discussion to gather and integrate the diverse perspectives of the CLeaR community on this topic. There is a general consensus that LLMs are not yet capable of causal reasoning at the current stage but has a lot of potential with public available information by CLeaR 2023. Enhancing causal machine learning is vital not only for its own sake but also to help LLMs improve their performance, especially regarding trustworthiness. In this document, we present both the summary and the raw outcome of the round table discussion. We acknowledge that with the progress of both fields, the opportunities and impact may rapidly change. We will repeat the same exercise in CLeaR 2024 to document the evolution.