The issue in this discussion is that "predict the next token" is a problematically reductive description of what's going on. It's like saying compilers are programs that emit bytes or that humans are mammals that make sounds. It's not strictly false but it's not capturing the depth of what's happening either.
A simple way to see this is to ask: predicting the next token of what? The obvious answer - predicting the next token that would be found in the training set - isn't correct. If that's what it were doing then it would yield no prediction or random predictions for any prefix not found in that training set, but it isn't what happens. We see generalization and reasoning. They can answer questions never asked before. And once post-training kicks in the question of what it's predicting becomes even harder. It becomes more like predicting what this specific AI assistant would say next, which is a circular definition.