By now, there's every reason to believe that this is what's happening in LLMs.

"Reasoning primitives" are learned in pre-training - and SFT and RL then assemble them into high performance reasoning chains, converting "reasoning as a side effect of next token prediction" to "reasoning as an explicit first class objective".

The end result is quite impressive. By now, it seems like the gap between human reasoning and LLM reasoning isn't "an entirely different thing altogether" - it's "humans still do it better at the very top end of the performance curve - when trained for the task and paying full attention".

Almost, they are the median or most popular aspects of the culture upon which they are trained. So you are getting the most popular way to do something, not the best (for some definition of best). That's why the claims about LLMs being geniuses is absurd. They almost by definition are going to have the average IQ of all the people on the net weighted by how much each person posts. I'm guessing that's about 95.