To me it feels that whatever 'proof' you give that LLMs have a model in behind, other than 'next token prediction', it would not make a difference for people not 'believing' that. I see this happening over and over on HN.

We don't know how reasoning emerges in humans. I'm pretty sure the multi-model-ness helps, but it is not needed for reasoning, because they imply other forms of input, hence just more (be it somewhat different) input. A blind person can still form an 'image'.

In the same sense, we don't know how reasoning emerges in LLMs. For me the evidence lays in the results, rather than in how it works. For me the results are enough of an evidence.