Stop Calling LLMs ‘Next-Token Predictors’. It’s a Dangerous Lie.
We tell ourselves a comforting lie to keep the existential dread at bay: ‘It’s just a next-token predictor.’ But the AI we are building has already outgrown this label. Through reinforcement learning and agentic frameworks, LLMs have evolved from statistical text generators into goal-seeking reasoning engines. The label isn’t a scientific description—it’s a cognitive defense mechanism blinding us to emergent intelligence.