> I'll admit that I find this discussion a bit navel-gazy. It has become a question of semantics not a question of actual functionality

Ah, so you're more in the Investor mindset than the Scientist mindset. All you care about is results, not how it got there. There's a whiff of "hey, it's magic!" to that.

Word games aren't scientific in the slightest, and as Hume says on verbal arguments in general, they "cannot possibly be of any importance."

No, that's stupid.

The question of how LLMs (and "LRM"'s, an unfortunate and by the article's own admission, already outdated term) accomplish what they accomplish is fascinating. The question of whether they reason is meaningless. Most of the article is about the latter, with tiny tiny tiny bits of the former.