The theoretical foundation of transformers is well understood; they're able to approximate a very wide family of functions, particularly with chain of thought (

The theoretical foundation of transformers is well understood; they're able to approximate a very wide family of functions, particularly with chain of thought ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07923 https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07923 ). Training them on next-token-prediction is essentially training them to compress, and more optimal compression requires a more accurate model of the world, so they're being trained to model the world better and better. However you want to define intelligence, for practical purposes models with better and better models of the world are more and more useful.