Comment by davidhs

Maybe if Terence Tao had memorized the entire Internet (and pretty much all media), then maybe he would find bits and pieces of the problem remind him of certain known solutions and be able to connect the dots himself.

But, I don't know. I tend to view these (reasoning) LLMs as alien minds and my intuition of what is perhaps happening under the hood is not good.

I just know that people have been using these LLMs as search engines (including Stephen Wolfram), browsing through what these LLMs perhaps know and have connected together.