I don’t think it’s conscious. Though at some point in the future, it will likely be hard to say that with total certainty.

Perhaps you’re right that the term thought has too much baggage. I’m just saying that if you look at it at naively, it’s engaging in forms of abstractions, reasoning, world modeling, invention, and so on that seem a lot like “thought”. If a human told you they were doing those things, you’d say they were thinking, right?

I agree it’s not thought in exactly the way that we are used to using the word, but I think it can be classified as a type of thought.