10 pages about the question means that the subsequent answer is more likely to be correct. That's why they repeat themselves.

But that goes in the chain of thought, not the response

citation needed

First of all, consider asking "why's that?" if you don't know what is a fairly basic fact, no need to go all reddit-pretentious "citation needed" as if we are deeply and knowledgeably discussing some niche detail and came across a sudden surprising fact.

Anyways, a nice way to understand it is that the LLM needs to "compute" the answer to the question A or B. Some questions need more compute to answer (think complexity theory). The only way an LLM can do "more compute" is by outputting more tokens. This is because each token takes a fixed amount of compute to generate - the network is static. So, if you encourage it to output more and more tokens, you're giving it the opportunity to solve harder problems. Apart from humans encouraging this via RLHF, it was also found (in deepseekmath paper) that RL+GRPO on math problems automatically encourages this (increases sequence length).

From a marketing perspective, this is anthropomorphized as reasoning.

From a UX perspective, they can hide this behind thinking... ellipses. I think GPT-5 on chatgpt does this.

A citation would be a link to an authoritative source. Just because some unknown person claims it's obvious that's not sufficient for some of us.

Expecting every little fact to have an "authoritative source" is just annoying faux intellectualism. You can ask someone why they believe something and listen to their reasoning, decide for yourself if you find it convincing, without invoking such a pretentious phrase. There are conclusions you can think to and reach without an "official citation".

Yeah. And in general, not taking a potshot at who you replied to, the only people who place citations/peer review on that weird faux-intellectual pedestal are people that don't work in academia. As if publishing something in a citeable format automatically makes it a fact that does not need to be checked for reason. Give me any authoritative source, and I can find you completely contradictory, or obviously falsifiable publications from their lab. Again, not a potshot, that's just how it is, lots of mistakes do get published.

I was actually just referencing the standard Wikipedia annotation that means something approximately like “you should support this somewhat substantial claim with something more than 'trust me bro'”

In other words, 10 pages of LLM blather isn’t doing much to convince me a given answer is actually better.

I approve this message. For the record I'm a working scientist with (unfortunately) intimate knowledge of the peer review system and its limitations. I'm quite ready to take an argument that stands on its own at face value, and have no time for an ipse dixit or isolated demand for rigor.

I just wanted to clarify what I thought was intended by the parent to my comment, especially aince I thought the original argument lacked support (external or otherwise).

People love to assert all kinds of meritless things about AI as if they were self-evident when they are anything but.

LLMs have essentially no capability for internal thought. They can't produce the right answer without doing that.

Of course, you can use thinking mode and then it'll just hide that part from you.

No, even in thinking mode it will sycophant and write huge essays as output.

It can work without, I just have to prompt it five times increasingly aggressively and it’ll output the correct answer without the fluff just fine.

They already do hide alot from you when thinking, this person wants them to hide more instead of doing their 'thinking' 'out loud' in the response.