Second, what is the difference? Is it that one thing has an immortal soul, and thus Actual Intelligence and Actual Reasoning and Actual Learning, and the other has no soul, and a Pale Imitation of Intelligence, At Best?
Because I've seen versions of this "it's not actually thinking" for actual fucking years, and the difference between "actually thinking" and "not actually thinking" always seems to boil down to "I don't want LLMs to be actually thinking, so I will bend the definitions and twist the qualifiers and move the goalposts until they aren't". No one ever made an ActualThinkingBenchmark on which humans score 100% and LLMs score 0%.
Nothing but human insecurity, in my eyes. There was never a principled difference. Just a way to operationalize some "I'm unique and special and better than a matrix math machine" vibes.