[PheonixPharts]

>_because that's the only way it can compute anything_

I'm fairly certain we'll soon realize that what's happening here is that the markov chain being run over latent space needs a certain amount of "warmup" before it starts sampling from the optimal region. HMC samplers for Bayesian methods have this same property.

The terms "reasoning", "computing" or "thinking" for this stage should be considered metaphors rather than explanations for what's happening, which is really waiting for a random walk to start sampling from the typical-set.