Having seen LLMs so many times produce coherent, sensible and valid chains of reasoning to diagnose issues and bugs in software I work on, I am at this point in absolutely no doubt that they are thinking.

Consciousness or self awareness is of course a different question, and ones whose answer seems less clear right now.

Knee jerk dismissing the evidence in front of your eyes because you find it unbelievable that we can achieve true reasoning via scaled matrix multiplication is understandable, but also betrays a lack of imagination and flexibility of thought. The world is full of bizarre wonders and this is just one more to add to the list.