Comment by MarkusQ

That's an interesting perspective.

Thing is, that would be a rebuttal if I'd said something about the underlying tensor fiddling code being understood, and you were claiming that next token prediction was a mysterious emergent phenomena.

Unfortunately that's not the argument I made. My claim is that there's nothing surprising or mysterious about the fact that a system designed to repeatedly generate a highly likely continuation of a sequence of tokens (considered as a member of pre-specified class of sequences) winds up producing something that looks like it could be a member of that class. That's kind of the whole point. These things were designed to predict plausible next tokens, and that's exactly what they do.