I think you are selling yourself short if you believe you can be replaced by a next token predictor :)
LLMs show it plain and clear: there's no magic in human intelligence. Abstract thinking is nothing but fancy computation. It can be implemented in math and executed on a GPU.
Now you get can't around that this might not be the case.
You're like that beetle going extinct mating with beer bottles.
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/06/19/193493225/t...
We've already found that LLMs implement the very same type of abstract thinking as humans do. Even with mechanistic interpretability being in the gutters, you can probe LLMs and find some of the concepts they think in.
But, of course, denying that is much less uncomfortable than the alternative. Another one falls victim to AI effect.
People have been arguing this is not the case for at least hundreds of years.
Any abstraction you're noticing in an LLM is likely just a plagiarized one
They do have the ability to fool people and exacerbate or cause mental problems.
But I as a chess player can easily be replaced by a chess engine and I as a programmer might soon be replaceable by a next token predictor.
The only reason programmers think they can't be replaced by a next token predictor is that programmers don't work that way. But chess players don't work like a chess engine either.