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This is kind of an epistemological debate at this level, and I make an effort to link to some source code [1] any time it seems contentious.
LLMs (of the decoder-only, generative-pretrained family everyone means) are next token predictors in a literal implementation sense (there are some caveats around batching and what not, but none that really matter to the philosophy of the thing).
But, they have some emergent behaviors that are a trickier beast. Probably the best way to think about a typical Instruct-inspired “chat bot” session is of them sampling from a distribution with a KL-style adjacency to the training corpus (sidebar: this is why shops that do and don’t train/tune on MMLU get ranked so differently than e.g. the arena rankings) at a response granularity, the same way a diffuser/U-net/de-noising model samples at the image batch (NCHW/NHWC) level.
The corpus is stocked with everything from sci-fi novels with computers arguing their own sentience to tutorials on how to do a tricky anti-derivative step-by-step.
This mental model has adequate explanatory power for anything a public LLM has ever been shown to do, but that only heavily implies it’s what they’re doing.
There is active research into whether there is more going on that is thus far not conclusive to the satisfaction of an unbiased consensus. I personally think that research will eventually show it’s just sampling, but that’s a prediction not consensus science.
They might be doing more, there is some research that represents circumstantial evidence they are doing more.
[1] https://github.com/meta-llama/llama/blob/54c22c0d63a3f3c9e77...