alt Hacker News> You can demonstrate definitively that there nothing other than "next token prediction" by running
Describing LLMs as next token predictors isn’t incorrect, it’s meaningless. It’s the equivalent of describing brains as “a bunch of atoms”.
The problem with these descriptions is that they say nothing about high-level capabilities. If you can predict the next token in a proof of the Riemann hypothesis, then you can prove the Riemann hypothesis.
In a similar vein, if the string of "next tokens" based on 300k input tokens is: "run this bash command and paste the results into the token stream", followed by another call that includes the output of that bash output giving "Based on the output from that bash command, now run head -n 30 /foo/bar/baz.txt and paste it here", finally followed by "Based on that, here's the problem with your systemd configuration: [...]"
The part that really bakes my noodle: `/foo/bar/baz.txt` can be a filename that no one has ever typed before, the error inside the file can be a typo that no one has ever typed before, and it will still correctly "predict the next token" to solve your problem.