Kambhampati's position paper: stop calling chain-of-thought "thinking"
Subbarao Kambhampati makes the case that labeling LLM intermediate tokens as "reasoning" or "thinking" traces is not a harmless metaphor but a dangerous one. It misleads users into reading human-like cognition into stochastic token prediction, warps how we evaluate and trust models, and steers research in questionable directions. His call: treat those traces for what they are, not as a window into a mind.