>It is meaningful to call that reasoning.

This take on the nature of sentience and consciounsess, things we humans have, know we have, and which are quite distinct from unaware pattern-matching, is becoming foolish and tedious.

No, it's not meaningful to call that reasoning. Indeed it's wrong, because it's not reasoning. That would require sentience, and absolutely zero evidence indicates its presence in any LLM. Are some people so glittered by their algorithmic tricks with communication that they simply fall to near religious beliefs in a conversational LLM being an example of awareness?

computers have been solving mathematical problems for decades. Would you thus argue that those machines were also reasoning?

But consider it like this: the model lives in a reward environment where it's tasked with outputting prescribed text or outputting the answer to certain questions.

Instead of just outputting the answer it generates non-output tokens based on which the probability of the answer that got it rewards before are increased.

Is this not a sort of reasoning? It looks ahead at imagined things and tries to gauge what will get it the reward?