I think most people who are interested in how LLMs work get the idea that they are basically token-predicting machines. They take some input, turn it into tokens, 'predict' a next token, stick it on the end of the input, and that becomes a new input. Then it runs the cycle again; repeat to fade…

The bit that I think fewer people understand is the 'sampling' step, where the LLM actually 'chooses' the token. If more people understood it, I think you'd be seeing it everywhere, because its honestly kind of mind-blowing.