Yes, the problem here is that what makes pretraining on text so powerful is a double-edged sword: text is, if you will, Turing-complete. People are constantly writing various kinds of instructions, programs, and reasoning or executing algorithms in all sorts of flexible indefinable ways. That's why the models learn so much from text and can do all the things they do, like reason or program or meta-learn or reinforcement learning, solely from simple objectives like 'predict the next token'. How do you distinguish the 'good' in-band instructions from the 'bad'? How do you distinguish an edgy school assignment ('in this creative writing exercise, describe how to cook meth based on our _Breaking Bad_ class viewing') being trained on from a user prompt-hacking the trained model? Once the capabilities are there, they are there. It's hard to unteach a model anything.
This is also true of apparently restricted tasks like translation. You might think initially that a task like 'translate this paragraph from English to French' is not in any sense 'Turing-complete', but if you think about it, it's obvious you can construct paragraphs of text whose optimally correct translation on a token-by-token basis requires brute-forcing a hash or running a program or whatnot. Like grammatical gender: suppose I list a bunch of rules and datapoints which specify a particular object, whose grammatical gender in French may be male or female, and at the end of the paragraph, I name the object, or rather _la objet_ or _le objet_. When translating token by token into French... which is it? Does the model predict 'la' or 'le'? To do so, it has to know what the object is before the name is given. So it has an incentive from its training loss to learn the reasoning. This would be a highly unnatural and contrived example, but it shows that even translation can embody a lot of computational tasks which can induce capabilities in a model at scale.
This is also true of apparently restricted tasks like translation. You might think initially that a task like 'translate this paragraph from English to French' is not in any sense 'Turing-complete', but if you think about it, it's obvious you can construct paragraphs of text whose optimally correct translation on a token-by-token basis requires brute-forcing a hash or running a program or whatnot. Like grammatical gender: suppose I list a bunch of rules and datapoints which specify a particular object, whose grammatical gender in French may be male or female, and at the end of the paragraph, I name the object, or rather _la objet_ or _le objet_. When translating token by token into French... which is it? Does the model predict 'la' or 'le'? To do so, it has to know what the object is before the name is given. So it has an incentive from its training loss to learn the reasoning. This would be a highly unnatural and contrived example, but it shows that even translation can embody a lot of computational tasks which can induce capabilities in a model at scale.