[AnimalMuppet]

I view reasoning as something that LLMs do a kind of, or a subset of, and inference engines do a different kind or subset of. And there may be different kinds or subsets than just those two.

And just as inference engines, by themselves, were not enough to be really able to "reason", neither are LLMs, by themselves. (I think "AI" has historically been quite reductionist - they reduce thinking to only one kind of thinking, and then try to automate that. The result can sometimes be impressive, but always is less than what human thinking is.)

Tool calling or mixture-of-experts are in the direction that I'm thinking.