alt Hacker News> Describing it as a "next-token predictor" in the sense that this would mean it's fundamentally limited to just a fraction of an inferential step
I don't think anyone is doing that though; we know LLMs are not simple Markov chains, and that the prediction they make is based on more than the previous X words.
It's not minimising to describe even a complex prediction process as prediction.
But it literally is making a prediction based on the previous X tokens, it's just that X is huge and there is a proportionally huge number of parameters in the token generation function.