The point is that the next token predicted will change; and in a way everyone not being a anti-ai contrarian will say is smarter. And as far as TFA, we've know you can prompt models into being smarter for years know. Thats what CoT/thinking/reasoning is.

First half is right, but the second... That's not how CoT works.

I don't think that is what the parent said, but I'm afraid my comment was too snarky (apologies), and the audience in this thread is not eager to be changed in their beliefs. Thanks for taking the time to reply though.

LLMs are fed a lot of data, and there are many patterns in there, including reasoning and some logic. Adding a little domain specific data will not immediately learn that domain, but it will also not be limited to only that data in its reasoning.

And that's all we do, and it's all we need, and it's probably all there is.

The discovery that reinforcement learning allows next-token prediction to extrapolate beyond its pretrained data set is harder to explain than the discovery of fire or the wheel or electricity, but it's up there on that level.