Comment by vore

Doesn't the article say... exactly that?

  The basic concept of ChatGPT is at some level rather simple. Start from a huge sample of human-created text from the web, books, etc. Then train a neural net to generate text that’s “like this”. And in particular, make it able to start from a “prompt” and then continue with text that’s “like what it’s been trained with”.

Just because there are emergent behaviors doesn't mean it's not a probabilistic word generator. Nor does it being a probabilistic word generator mean it can't have interesting underlying properties.