Does water flowing through a maze solve it by 'thinking'? No. The rules of physics eventually result in the water flowing out the exit. Water also hits every dead end along the way.

The power of LLMs is that by only selecting sequences of words that fit a statistical model, they avoid a lot of dead ends.[^1]

I would not call that, by itself, thinking. However, if you start with an extrapolation engine and add the ability to try multiple times and build on previous results, you get something that's kind of like thinking.

[1]: Like, a lot of dead ends. There are an unfathomable number of dead ends in generating 500 characters of code, and it is a miracle of technology that Claude only hit 30.