I think the theory is that an LLM can integrate the knowledge of Wikipedia and become something greater than the sum of its parts by applying reasoning that is

I think the theory is that an LLM can integrate the knowledge of Wikipedia and become something greater than the sum of its parts by applying reasoning that is explained in one article to situations in other topics where the reasoning might not be so well explained. Then you can ask naive questions in new scenarios where you might not have the background knowledge (or simply the mental energy) to figure out a right answer to a situation on your own but it powers through for you. AFAIK current LLMs are not this abstract. If one type of reasoning is more often applied in one scenario and another type of reasoning is applied to another, they don't have any context beyond the words and they know what topics humans usually jump to from other given topics.