Modern LLMs are also "essentially only trained to predict the next word, based on what they've seen on the internet."
I'm not sure exactly how that works, but apparently instruct tuning produces mode collapse, whereas the older models are basically "raw unfiltered internet" (for better and worse).
I've been playing around with Davinci and it's remakable how much better the writing is.
You have to prompt it right, because all it does is continue the text. (E.g. if you ask it a question, it might respond with more questions.) But I think we really lost something valuable when we started neglecting the base/text models.