I personally love LLMs and use them daily for a variety of tasks. I really do not know how to “fix” the terminology. I agree with you that they are not thinking in the abstract like humans. I also do not know what else you would call “chain-of-thought”.
Perhaps “journaling-before-answering” lol. It’s basically talking out loud to itself. (Is that still being too anthropomorphic?)
Chain of thought is what LLMs report to be their internal process--but they have no access to their internal process ... their reports are confabulation, and a study by Anthropic showed how far they are from actual internal processes.
Perhaps “journaling-before-answering” lol. It’s basically talking out loud to itself. (Is that still being too anthropomorphic?)
Is this comment me “thinking out loud”? shrug