Perhaps reasoning and understanding are things that don’t exist and that humans themselves are just next token predictors.
Heck reasoning and understanding are ill defined concepts. It might even be running on the same bullshit fuel as the word “spirituality”. Maybe the rigorous definition of all these vague words like intelligence or comprehension is really just next token prediction.
Eh well they were defined in the world where human intelligence was the only thing around, so there were... baked in assumptions. But as the current definitions go, I don't think there's any need for included consciousness or self awareness for these terms to apply, despite what people seem to immediately jump to. There's no part where it needs to mean human-level proficiency either.
Understanding is having knowledge about something, reasoning is making logical conclusions from it, and intelligence is being able to do it continuously with newly presented information. All things that well trained LLMs can arguably do to a detectable extent.
Heck reasoning and understanding are ill defined concepts. It might even be running on the same bullshit fuel as the word “spirituality”. Maybe the rigorous definition of all these vague words like intelligence or comprehension is really just next token prediction.