[scrollaway]

You phrased it better (and with a lot more patience) than I ever could muster.

So many people I meet are so deeply convinced LLMs absolutely cannot physically think, because they define "thinking" as "that thing you do with your human brain where neurons are involved", and they define "LLM thinking" as "that thing ChatGPT does where it says it's thinking but it's actually just detached inference".

The underlying assumption is usually two-fold:

1. That simulated thinking is not thinking.

2. That "LLM thinking" is always only defined as Chain of Thought.

Well, 1 is a pretty useless stance to have, because it removes space for any useful definition of what thinking is. And 2 is simply false, as presented by Anthropic here: https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace