> The assumption that most people make is that these models can answer questions or chat with you, but in reality all they can do is take some text you provide as input and guess what the next word (or more accurately, the next token) is going to be.
These two things cannot be compared or contrasted. It's very common to see people write something like "LLMs don't actually do <thing they obviously actually do>, they just do <dismissive description of the same thing>."
Typically, like here, the dismissive description just ignores the problem of why it manages to write complete novel sentences when it's only "guessing" subword tokens, why those sentences appear to be related to the question you asked, and why they are in the form of an answer to your question instead of another question (which is what base models would do).
These two things cannot be compared or contrasted. It's very common to see people write something like "LLMs don't actually do <thing they obviously actually do>, they just do <dismissive description of the same thing>."
Typically, like here, the dismissive description just ignores the problem of why it manages to write complete novel sentences when it's only "guessing" subword tokens, why those sentences appear to be related to the question you asked, and why they are in the form of an answer to your question instead of another question (which is what base models would do).