The over­loading of common words is well underway: new lan­guage models have “thinking” modes, “reasoning” capabilities! What this means, in practice, is that they’ve learned to pro­duce a spe­cial kind of text, the con­ver­sion of the lin­guistic if-then into a dynamo that spins and spins and, often, magically — yes, it is magical — pro­duces useful results.

Here is one dis­tinc­tion among several: this process can only compound — the models can only “think” by spooling out more text — while human thinking often does the oppo­site: retreats into silence, because it doesn’t have words yet to say what it wants to say.

Human thinking often washes the dishes, then goes for a walk.

[…] We are going to lose this word — we might already have lost it — but/and we can put a marker down; a gravestone, you might call it; for a kind of thinking that used to mean more than “more”.

— Robin Sloan, Thinking modes, 2025