I am pretty sure Claude 3.5 Sonnet can reason or did reason with a particular snippet of code I was working on. I am not an expert in this area but my guessing is that these neural nets (made for language prediction) are being used for reasoning. But that’s not their optimal behavior (since they are token predictor). A big jump in reasoning will happen when reasoning is off loaded to an LRM.

Human brains are sure big but they are inefficient because a big portion of the brain is going to non-intelligence stuff like running the body internal organs, eye vision, etc…

I do agree that the money is not well spent. They should haver recognized that we are hitting s local maximum with the current model and funding should be going to academic/theoretical instead of dump brute force.