au contrair -- Literally the first line of the widely known 2022 Big-Bench paper on large language models, with over 100 authors, says: Generative language mod

au contrair -- Literally the first line of the widely known 2022 Big-Bench paper on large language models, with over 100 authors, says: Generative language models have as their core capability the production of the most likely continuation for a text sequence. This seemingly simple skill is remarkably general. Any task that can be specified and executed via text can be framed as text continuation. This encompasses a wide range of cognitive tasks, including tasks that can be resolved over chat or email, for example, or in a web forum.