Thinking is a big word that sweeps up a lot of different human behavior, so I don't know if it's right to jump to that; HOWEVER, explanations of LLMs that depend heavily on next-token prediction are defunct. They stopped being fundamentally accurate with the rise of massive reinforcement learning and w/ 'reasoning' models the analogy falls apart when you try to do work with it.

Be on the lookout for folks who tell you these machines are limited because they are "just predicting the next word." They may not know what they're talking about.