Not even remotely true. It's part of the context window, so it greatly influences the final output. CoT is tokens generated by the LLM just like normal output.

It's more hallucination in the sense that all LLM output is hallucination. CoT is not "what the llm is thinking". I think of it as just creating more context/prompt for itself on the fly, so that when it comes up with a final response it has all that reasoning in its context window.

The calculator is an extreme example, but I've wondered in the past if the reason they scrub everything is so you can't take the manufacturer part number to buy elsewhere. McMaster is undoubtedly more expensive in many cases, but the service they offer is consolidating a million parts into one catalog with CAD drawings, specs, etc. Hiding branding prevents you from taking advantage of that without making a purchase.

> It’s a bit like saying Dropbox is just a GUI on top of TLS.

Well, it is. After all, for a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially...

Great article. And thanks for the correct OSM attribution in your map images. :)