Honestly, people need to get over this debate. It's pretty irrelevant in a lot of cases. When people ask "what is the model thinking?", they're really asking "what caused the model to produce this response (as opposed to a bunch of other plausible ones)?"

Whether it's thinking or word prediction or whatever you want to call it, people are trying to understand the causal chain.

It's not just a nominalistic debate though, as the people who are vocal against the idea that LLMs might "understand" or "think" also claim that because of this, they are fundamentally limited in what they can achieve, in contrast to human beings. Therefore any possibility of actual intelligence (or even superintelligence) is, according to them, just a fantasy.

Angry diatribes about whether submarines swim or not.