Thinking/reasoning tokens kind of approximate that actually, which is what most flagships and even my own local LLM use.

Thinking tokens are quite like normal generative tokens, except that the LLM is 'talking' to itself. You can see its thoughts (depending on what settings you've put/IDE you use), but they aren't meant to be the actual response to your prompt. They are what the AI is designed to draft their answer before committing, to explore different options and to 'reason' itself into a more refined response.

Reasoning tokens is how AI can actually do math now, rather than just guess a number and pray, by the way.

it might go a very different direction than your expecting.

I mean yeah sure, but so it goes with humans. Like yes of course i think we all agree an expert who spends hours drafting and revising some document will do a much better job than AI, not even close. But most humans aren't experts in anything and even fewer will spend the time effort and attention into producing truly excellent work.

But yeah i talk to people at work all day about work stuff and i work really hard to give clear concise easily digestible instructions to my humam coworkers, and I get truly stupid lazy inattentive answers all fucking day. and when i put half as mucb effort into writing clear instructions for AI, AI gets it right every time.

No AI isn't perfect but as humans we are deeply flawed and AI straight up kicks all my coworkers asses. Idk if you AI haters all have jobs at wonderful workplaces where everyone is intelligent works hard and has strong attention to detail, but for the rest of us AI is extremely fucking helpful.