HRM (hierarchical reasoning model) does make sense (breaking down thinking to hierarchical reasoning - a loop of high level planning + low level computation). Does it work? The benchmark shown are impressive. Having said that, I doubt if it will be a replacement of existing CoT. CoT is also not a replacement of non-thinking architecture either. Many problems are solved better without thinking models. Many problems will be better solved with CoT. And a large number of problems will be more suitable for HRM. We need some more research on which problem space aligns with the non-thinking vs CoT vs HRM.
Old AI architecture is 1000x faster and accurate with 0 training examples: solvers
perceptrons, memory-in-a-box, back-propagation (even though it's computation expensive), Long-term-short-term memory, Support Vector Machines and other Neural Networks.
In the book "Artificial Intelligence A Modern Approach" by Stuart Russell and Peter Norviq, you may find more gems.