However it’s disingenuous to say the inference is on the next token because it’s actually not, it’s in the models parameter space across a set of nonlinear activation functions then effectively projected into the token. The idea its predictive of the token isn’t actually the case, it really is a much more complex and more semantic relationship that ends in the series of tokens through the attention mechanism.
The article also makes this assertion that it replays everything over and over again to create each character one at a time as some way to demonstrate the autoregressive self attention mechanism but it’s really not accurate at all, and it trivializes what is going on.
I’m am not asserting LLMs are aware or conscious that’s on the surface profoundly absurd. And I do understand your point that the fact it emits in words something that seems to speak to us gives to the air of humanity that’s isnt real. However there is a very real emergent reality that our language alone appears to lead to embedding a form of thought and understanding that is latent in our use of language in communicating that is in fact coming through the model. It is not regurgitating its corpus and pattern matching because the patterns you input and it emits are not where the inference is operating, its within this enormous vector space through these complex non linear activation functions with learned residuals not in the language corpus.
It is not conscious or aware. It is something else, not human. But if you can not see it as amazing you have lost the capacity to dream.