Looping transformers uses additional calculations (repeating layers) to generate a token.
Reasoning (in this context) is test time generation of multiple tokens that allow a model to have a scratch pad to refine its thoughts, chain of thought reasoning in other words.
Doing the former in no way means that you have to hide the latter.
Raschka is right in this post, The Information article was wrong. The Astra system card does concede reasoning traces are sometimes smaller, but this could be for a lot of reasons, including simple efficiency. And it absolutely doesn’t mean they are going away or completely obscured.
The Last Week in AI podcast from Sept 8 seems to have gotten this wrong as well. Jeremie Harris rages that OpenAI implemented latent reasoning, ala the coconut paper, which could potentially actually obscure reasoning traces. But for the life of me, I do not know how he arrived at this conclusion and see no evidence that this has happened in Astra.