I'll just note here that sure, there are people who go around thinking that LLMs are actually endowed with the capacity to reason, but generally I find the people who think this do not know what an LLM and will just use the name "ChatGPT"

What would it take for you to say that an LLM can reason?

The completions they provide are generally internally consistent. We're at the point where they can produce proofs that eluded human mathematicians for centuries. VLMs and self driving cars can handle ambiguity and run safely in a variety of situations.

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck maybe it just makes sense to call it a duck and put off the philosophy for when it might make a difference.

Yeah and there are people who worship feces, but that doesn't stop the rest of us from freely saying "holy shit" and not correcting each other saying "technically it's not holy, and you shouldn't say that, because you might enable one of those poop worshippers."

We can't tailor our linguistic shorthand to the lowest common denominator. Also we're on HN, not talking to an octogenarian US senator.