> which in no way challenge the established view that these bots are next-token predictors.

I mean, of course they are, that's literally what the inference loop does. You can look at the source of your favorite model runner and you'll see exactly that.

What I find misleading about this term is that it focuses attention on the "next token" part and glosses over the "prediction" part as some sort of unspecified "statistical algorithm" - even though this is where most of the work happens and where the interesting questions are.