That's absolutely right, it just predicts the next token. One of the discoveries that led to GPT was the concept that "token prediction is universal" in the sen

That's absolutely right, it just predicts the next token. One of the discoveries that led to GPT was the concept that "token prediction is universal" in the sense that all other natural language tasks are a sub-task of token prediction. For example translating between one language and another is just predicting what would continue after you say something then say "and here it is in french: ". There are levels to token production from generating complete jibberish, to generating very shallow nonsense sentences, to generating gramatically coherent sentences that dont really say anything, .. and so on. They've pushed the depth of its token prediction to a new level that makes it more impressive than anything previous.