If you gave GPT-2 a question and ended with a "?", it might answer, but also it might write several more questions in a similar category.

IMO, the mechanism isn't the important thing, the behaviour is. If you look at the step-by-step, we are also looking for the next word or motor action (and for whoever is about to suggest that we humans plan ahead, Transformer-based LLMs have been shown to also do this); as this is not a useful description of what it means to be a living brain, I'd say it's also not a useful description of what makes everything post-InstructGPT different from what came before.

I agree completely - behaviorally the models have changed drastically due to RLHF, RLVR and now maybe even more so due to agentic harnesses. But the mechanism of prediction hasn’t changed, that was all I was clarifying.