" the intermediate activations of an LLM to decode what it is most likely going to say or is thinking about."

There is no thinking in these models. The J space is a basic technique measuring how much the influence of shifting a token earlier changes it later. Anthropic can wrap it up in a 100-page paper peppered with language about 'consciousness' and other, but that is basically the gist of the entire method.

Discussing whether models "think" is impossibly confounded by conflicting definitions of that it means to "think".

All this noise about "thinking" isn't really about what models can do, it's mostly about what what every participant in the conversation privately thinks "thinking" means, but we disagree because we're not all using the word the same way.

So when you admonish someone to say "there is no thinking in these models" while not clearly defining exactly what you mean by "thinking", your assertion that models don't do it are meaningless at best, and false or deceptive at worst.