LLMs clearly think. They don't have a sense of object permanence, at least not yet, but they absolutely, indisputably use pretrained information to learn and reason about the transient context they're working with at the moment.

Otherwise they couldn't solve math problems that aren't simple rephrasings of problems they were trained on, and they obviously can do that. If you give a multi-step undergraduate level math problem to the human operator of a Chinese room, he won't get very far, while an LLM can.

So that leads to the question: given that they were trained on nothing but language, and given that they can reason to some extent, where did that ability come from if it didn't emerge from latent structure in the training material itself? Language plus processing is sufficient to produce genuine intelligence, or at least something indistinguishable from it. I don't know about you, but I didn't see that coming.

They very clearly do not think. If they did, they wouldn't be able to be fooled by so many simple tests that even a very small (and thus, uneducated) human would pass.