alt Hacker NewsThis comment attracted a lot of analogies trying to reduce something to something else (calling humans a "bag of chemicals"), but the flaw in those analogies is that they're reducing something valuable to something that sounds less valuable.
With an LLM, the tokens are the valuable part. That's what I want from it. That's why it exists. The tokens are the point, and it produces those tokens one by one for me.
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You are not wrong, but I think atleastoptimal's suggestion was that descriptions like "next-token predictor" are often used to imply that there's not much to see here, perhaps with an implied "obviously" in there. "Stochastic parrot" seems to be a case in point: no-one expects intelligent, informed conversation or working software from a parrot - not even the eternally-resting Alex.
Simple Markov chains are next token predictors, and they can provide you with much more tokens than you can consume, and much cheaper than from llms. Unbeatable in price and simplicity.
But there is no trillion dollar industry around cheap top Markov models. So there must be something about LLM tokens that makes them more valuable than those generated from a simple Markov chain. And that substance, that makes one valuable and the other not, is exactly what reduction to "next-token predictors" masks.