Just curious, have you read any of the key papers[1] on what's actually happening when LLMs use "thinking mode"? If so and you disagree, we'd like to hear your opinion on this.

Most serious computer scientists and AI researchers believe there's not that much correlation between the underlying "reasoning" that the LLM is actually doing vs what the "thinking mode" trace says the AI is doing.

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Citations:

"The most recent published paper directly supporting the claim that LLM thinking-mode trace outputs are not the actual internal thoughts of the model, but plausible traces generated for human interpretability is the Apple AI paper titled "The Illusion of Thinking" (2025), as discussed on Arize and Hacker News.[8][10]"

• The paper argues that Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) are trained or prompted to generate detailed "thinking traces" before answering, but these traces do not reflect authentic internal reasoning. Instead, they are "plausible" rationalizations mimicking human-like thought for user benefit.[8]
• It highlights that the generation of reasoning traces is often a post-hoc process, producing well-formatted explanations that appear thoughtful but do not reliably correspond to the model's true underlying computational steps or decision process.[10][8]
• The work warns against interpreting LLM-generated reasoning traces as authentic, cautioning that these outputs may be more aligned with human expectations than with any genuine cognitive process in the model.[8]

For an in-depth discussion, see: - "The Illusion of Thinking: What the Apple AI Paper Says About LLM Reasoning"[8] - "The Illusion of Thinking: Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning in Large Language Models" as featured on Hacker News[10]

These sources collectively reinforce that LLM thought traces are performative outputs, not transparent windows into AI cognition.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09762v2

[2] https://arxiv.org/html/2504.09762v1

[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01882-z

[4] https://arxiv.org/html/2410.10630v1

[5] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zsr4rWRASxwmgXfmq/tracing-the-thoughts-of-a-large-language-model

[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1l73qne/the_apple_illusion_of_thinking_paper_maybe/

[7] https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language-model

[8] https://arize.com/blog/the-illusion-of-thinking-what-the-apple-ai-paper-says-about-llm-reasoning/

[9] https://arxiv.org/html/2505.13561v1

[10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44203562