I find that a lot of people have trouble with this concept of predicting the next token. And by trouble, I mean that they struggle to understand what it actually means to predict the next token. It seems simpler than it is. Because when you say "predict the next token," I think what most people think of is the Markov chain intuition that you have a big table of statistics, and then you look at what word is the next most likely, and then you pick that as the word.

The thing about this is that if you have ever used a Markov chain, you would know that Markov chain text is complete gibberish. Markov chain text does not resemble meaningful writing. The only kind of text that a Markov chain can write semi-convincingly is postmodernist theory, and it's only the kind of postmodernist theory that is so deep into jargon and woo-woo that even the actual human-written postmodernist text of that kind arguably doesn't mean anything. Markov chains are not capable of producing any kind of meaningful text. Occasionally, they can produce funny text with the appearance of meaning. For example, someone at one point made a [...]

---

Outline:

(20:30) Next Token Prediction And g

(30:40) Self Modeling Through Outrospection

---

First published:
May 19th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AzRRPDNmeEoJdSiib/implications-of-predicting-the-next-token

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.