The question of what constitutes reasoning is extremely difficult to answer or attempt to answer in a rigorous way. We struggle with clear bright lines on this even as concerns biological organisms with vastly more flexible goal-directed behaviors, and on the closely related concept of consciousness, we lack a consensus even for humans in the womb.

Speaking for myself I tend to focus on “useful” levels of planning, generality, and goal-seeking to sidestep some of the thornier philosophical issues.

Even there things are wildly controversial. There is a significant group (including some very serious and credentialed experts) who claim that the trajectory is clear: some version of AGI is not only possible with these architectures but so imminent as to demand drastic policy decisions.

There is another group (likewise including unimpeachably credentialed experts) who claim that there is no evidence for this extraordinary claim, and that attention decoders in no way show potential for this kind of generality.

My understanding of the math and mechanism, for whatever it’s worth, inclines me to agree with the latter group.

The real answer is: no one could possibly know at this point. My impression is that very few experts believe that transformers alone will lead to AGI (which surely requires ‘reliable reasoning’), even amongst those who believe we’ll all be intellectually replaceable within a decade.

But I don’t think any of the big closed source models are relying entirely on next token prediction anymore. They are using reinforcement learning to add new (more complex) objectives to the training. This might allow for better reasoning abilities within the same architecture.

Probably not, but in some, or most, cases may be. You can see it in schools on math exams. Not all pupil can do it, some lack the knowledge, but most simply cannot put things together. "WHY" is another big question.