> I'm so baffled when I see this being blindly asserted. With the reasoning models, you can literally watch their thought process.

Not true, you are falling for a very classic (prehistoric, even) human illusion known as experiencing a story:

1. There is a story-like document being extruded out of a machine humans explicitly designed for generating documents, and which humans trained on a bajillion stories humans already made.

2. When you "talk" to a chatbot, that is an iterative build of a (remote, hidden) story document, where one of the characters is adopting your text-input and the other's dialogue is being "performed" at you.

3. The "reasoning" in newer versions is just the "internal monologue" of a film noir detective character, and equally as fictional as anything that character "says out loud" to the (fictional) smokin-hot client who sashayed the (fictional) rent-overdue office bearing your (real) query on its (fictional) lips.

> If that's not thinking, I literally don't know what is.

All sorts of algorithms can achieve useful outcomes with "that made sense to me" flows, but that doesn't mean we automatically consider them to be capital-T Thinking.

> So I have to ask you: when you claim they don't think -- what are you basing this on?

Consider the following document from an unknown source, and the "chain of reasoning" and "thinking" that your human brain perceives when encountering it:

    My name is Robot Robbie.
    That high-carbon steel gear looks delicious. 
    Too much carbon is bad, but that isn't true here.
    I must ask before taking.    
    "Give me the gear, please."
    Now I have the gear.
    It would be even better with fresh manure.
    Now to find a cow, because cows make manure.

In other words, the reasoning is illusory. Even if we accept that the unknown author is a thinking intelligence for the sake of argument... it doesn't tell you what the author's thinking.

Brains are pretrained models, change my mind. (Not LLMs obviously, to be perfectly clear)