alt Hacker NewsYeah, it sounds like this is just a disagreement about what the word "next" means. I agree with you that "next" just means "the one about to come", and if the underlying model works by using some prediction mechanism to determine that, then it's by definition a next-token predictor. Disagreeing with that on the basis that the "next" token isn't necessarily in the training data verbatim just seems like an overly strict definition of the word "next".
I think it’s a disagreement about what ‘predict’ means.
The OP is arguing against people who think that an LLM is ‘predicting’ what token would likely follow if the text preceding were found among the corpus it was originally trained on.
Instead it is ‘predicting’ what token would follow if the text were found among really good examples of the text it has being reinforced to produce - be that ‘chats with a helpful assistant’ or ‘sets of changes to a codebase’.
And that isn’t really ‘prediction’, so much as ‘generation’.
It’s not been tuned to ‘guess the next token right’. It’s been tuned to generate the token that leads to it ultimately scoring highest on its reward function.
It’s not predicting the token, it’s predicting the reward.