"Does it generalize past the training data" has been a pre-registered goalpost since before the attention transformer architecture came on the scene.

  >'thinking' vs 'just recombinating things

If there is a difference, and LLM's can do one but not the other...

  >By that standard (and it is a good standard), none of these "AI" things are doing any thinking

  >"Does it generalize past the training data" has been a pre-registered goalpost since before the attention transformer architecture came on the scene.

Then what the fuck are they doing.

Learning is thinking, reasoning, what have you.

Move goalposts, re-define words, it won't matter.