[modeless]

It's clear that in the general case "predict the next word" requires arbitrarily good understanding of everything that can be described with language. That shouldn't be mysterious. What's mysterious is how a simple training procedure with that objective can in practice achieve that understanding. But then again, does it? The base model you get after that simple training procedure is not capable of doing the things described in the article. It is only useful as a starting point for a much more complex reinforcement learning procedure that teaches the skills an agent needs to achieve goals.

RL is where the magic comes from, and RL is more than just "predict the next word". It has agents and environments and actions and rewards.