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.