Modern English lexicography is descriptive and not prescriptive. The OED is simply insufficient to show much more than a particular meaning was common among some cohort.
ELIZA transcripts also use to pass as human even with experts in some contexts, but was clearly mimicry.
It is almost impossible to have real discussions on this topic without deciding on definitions beforehand.
Especially with the impressive results of modern LLMs, but they are still essentially pattern finding and matching.
If that meets your personal definition of 'reasoning' that is fine.
It is probably advisable to understand the limitations if you are going to monetize it.
Even stochastic parrots may have practical applications, but mimicry doesn't prove understanding.
One challenge is that modern LLMs are so huge that it is fairly difficult to find anything outside the corpus.
Look at OpenAI's GPT4 technical report and you will see that almost all of its performance on school tests is from pre-training.
That doesn't diminish the potential value, but it does point to the limits. If you have access to things that are reliably not in the corpus, or are likely to be lost with set shattering it is fairly easy to show it is still NLP without a real understanding of the tokens.
But that is my personal definition of 'reasoning', which obviously isn't the same as yours.
ELIZA transcripts also use to pass as human even with experts in some contexts, but was clearly mimicry.
It is almost impossible to have real discussions on this topic without deciding on definitions beforehand.
Especially with the impressive results of modern LLMs, but they are still essentially pattern finding and matching.
If that meets your personal definition of 'reasoning' that is fine.
It is probably advisable to understand the limitations if you are going to monetize it.
Even stochastic parrots may have practical applications, but mimicry doesn't prove understanding.
One challenge is that modern LLMs are so huge that it is fairly difficult to find anything outside the corpus.
Look at OpenAI's GPT4 technical report and you will see that almost all of its performance on school tests is from pre-training.
That doesn't diminish the potential value, but it does point to the limits. If you have access to things that are reliably not in the corpus, or are likely to be lost with set shattering it is fairly easy to show it is still NLP without a real understanding of the tokens.
But that is my personal definition of 'reasoning', which obviously isn't the same as yours.