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> This shows a deep misunderstanding of the paper's claims, which in no way challenge the established view that these bots are next-token predictors.

No, this shows an appreciation of the symbolic richness behind that token 'prediction' which the paper leads on.

> Regardless, if all you want is a next-token selector, save your money and roll a die.

Tell me, where is the emergent symbology guiding that dice?

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> No, this shows an appreciation of the symbolic richness behind that token 'prediction' which the paper leads on.

The paper claims no symbolic richness beyond that evident from the undisputed next-token prediction.

> Tell me, where is the emergent symbology guiding that dice?

There's none. That's my point.

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> which in no way challenge the established view that these bots are next-token predictors.

I mean, of course they are, that's literally what the inference loop does. You can look at the source of your favorite model runner and you'll see exactly that.

What I find misleading about this term is that it focuses attention on the "next token" part and glosses over the "prediction" part as some sort of unspecified "statistical algorithm" - even though this is where most of the work happens and where the interesting questions are.

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