Isn't that you asking the Whys and How's? If you asked an LLM "What's 5*4?" and it responded with "Why do you want to know that?", the LLM would be doing the abstract reasoning.
No, those would simply be the most statistically likely words given it's training set and input. It has no idea what 5'4" is to do abstract reasoning. It's a statisitic word probability model not an abstract thought model.
They are stochastic parrots with a large complex training set, not reasoning.
