Comment by pbhjpbhj

If you look at transfer learning, I think that is a useful point at which to understand task-specific application and hence why LLMs excel at some tasks and not others.

Tasks are specialised for using the training corpus, the attention mechanisms, the loss functions, and such.

I'll leave it to others to expand on actual answers, but IMO focusing on transfer learning helps to understand how an LLM does inferences.