This is especially tricky for people to hear, because most of the talk around LLMs is actually about LLMs personified. Prediction certainly is one of the thing

This is especially tricky for people to hear, because most of the talk around LLMs is actually about LLMs personified. Prediction certainly is one of the things we do with language. That doesn't mean it is the only thing! It's my contention that most of the behavior people are excited about LLMs exhibiting is really still human behavior that was captured and saved as data into the language itself. LLMs are not modeling grammar or language: they are modeling language examples. Human examples. Language echoes human thought, so it's natural for a model of that behavior (a model of humans using language) to echo the same behavior (human thought). Let's not forget, as exciting as it may be, that an echo is not an emulation.