Sure, but we have clear evidence that generating this pseudo-reasoning text helps the model to make better decisions afterwards. Which means that it not only lo

Sure, but we have clear evidence that generating this pseudo-reasoning text helps the model to make better decisions afterwards. Which means that it not only looks like reasoning but also effectively serves the same purpose. Additionally, the new "reasoning" models don't just train on human text - they also undergo a Reinforcement Learning training step, where they are trained to produce whatever kinds of "reasoning" text help them "reason" best (i.e., leading to correct decisions based on that reasoning). This further complicates things and makes it harder to say "this is one thing and one thing only".