[overgard]

Autocomplete can predict the next token without understanding. It's a matter of probability. LLM's predict the next token with much more accuracy because they have much more data on token spatial relationships. To me that's not "understanding", that's "impressive statistical pattern discovery". The difference between a machine and a human though is we can infer that pattern discovery from a small data set, whereas LLM's can only do that because they have the entire internet's worth of data and then some. Of course you're going to make pretty good predictions of text if you have all the knowledge humanity has ever created. I'd be more impressed if you could make a small language model that could reason from first principles to become a large language model.