> here is some amount of hiding this through "thinking" modes that are hidden by default, but still you have to remember that ALL THEY ARE are complex statistical machines for predicting the next symbol.
100% this. Too many people believes that chatbots "think". Text is all they do, it is impressive, but they need the text to generate more text. They being verbose is the point.
While we don't have a direct mechanistic understanding of consciousness there are plenty of experts who will propose all YOU are is a jumble of streams of symbols routing around through your brain. (being fair this is far from the only hypothesis)