One is analogous to how LLMs operate and is essentially next token prediction. Think of your mental state when you’re very engrossed in conversation. It’s not a truly conscious act. Sometimes you even surprise yourself. If you’re a child, or childish, you may just confabulate things in the moment, maybe without realizing that you’re doing it in the moment.
Now think of some very difficult problem you’ve had to solve. It’s not the same, right? It’s a very conscious act, directing your focus here and there, trying to reason on how everything fits together and what you might change to fix your problem. Odds are good that you’re not even using language to model the problem in your head.
LLMs are doing the first thing, and are exceptionally good at it even in this early stage. The surprising thing to me is how far this can get you. If you have an inhuman level of knowledge to work from then in conversation mode you can actually solve some moderately difficult problems.
I think that maps to our own experiences as well. For the things that you have deep knowledge on you will sometimes find yourself solving a problem just by constructing sentences.