thank you for your response, the cauliflower anecdote was enlightening. your description of it being a statistical prediction model is essentially my existing conception of LLMs, but this was only really from gleaning other's conceptions online, and I've recently been concerned it was maybe an incomplete simplification of the process. I will definitely read up on markov chains to try and solidify my understanding of LLM 'prediction

I have kind of a follow up if you have the time. I hear a lot that LLMs are "running out of data" to train on. When it comes creating a bicycle schematic, it doesn't seem like additional data would make an LLM more effective at a task like this, since its already producing a broken amalgamation. It seems like generally these shortcomings of LLMs' generalizations would not be alleviated by increased training data. So what exactly is being optimized by massive increases (at this point) in training data--or, conversely, what is threatened by a limited pot?

I ask this because lots of people who preach that LLMs are doomed/useless seem to focus in on this idea that their training is limited. To me their generalization seems like evidence enough that we are no where near the tech-bro dreams of AGI.