It _is_ all the same task (generating text completions) but that pretraining on that task has seemed to be suitably abstract for the model to work decently well

It _is_ all the same task (generating text completions) but that pretraining on that task has seemed to be suitably abstract for the model to work decently well on more narrow problems—certainly they work dramatically better at a collection of tasks like “sentiment analysis of movie ratings” and “spam classifier” than if I took purposes built models for either of those tasks and tried using them like I could an LLM.