An actual "thinking machine" would be constantly running computations on its accumulated experience in order to improve its future output and/or further compress its sensory history.
An LLM is doing exactly nothing while waiting for the next prompt.
I think the thing you were looking for was more along the lines of a persistent autonomous agent.
Still, what current LLMs are doing with their fixed rules is only a very limited form of reasoning since they just use a fixed N-steps of rule application to generate each word. People are looking to techniques such "group of experts" prompting to improve reasoning - step-wise generate multiple responses then evaluate them and proceed to next step.
An LLM has no innate traits such as curiosity or boredom to trigger exploration, and anyways no online/incremental learning mechanism to benefit from it even if it did.