Comment by fragmede

There are some that would describe LLMs as next word predictors, akin to having a bag of magnetic words, where you put your hand in, rummage around, and just pick a next word and put it on the fridge and eventually form sentences. It's "just" predicting the next word, so as an analogy as to how they work, that seems reasonable. The thing is, when that bag consists of a dozen bags-in-bags, like Russian nesting dolls, and the "bag" has a hundred million words in it, the analogy stops being a useful description. It's like describing humans as multicellular organisms. It's an accurate description of what a human is, but somewhere between a simple hydra with 100,000 cells and a human with 3 trillion cells, intelligence arises. Describing humans as merely multicellular organisms and using hydra as your point of reference isn't going to get you very far.