Half of this is arguing about semantics, which is incredibly boring. If you don’t like the words "motivation" or "intent", use the actual term of art, "goal". Which these systems definitely have, and which any chain-of-thought model factors into subgoals and sub-subgoals.

The other half doesn’t seem to realize that LLMs now run in loops for hours and hours, nothing like the basic "human prompt -> reply -> stop" conversation interface.