I don't think it's outrageous when many of the people who claimed it was a next-token predictor have been proven wrong repeatedly over the past 5 years. There were people years ago who claims AI could never answer questions like "what would happen to a ball on a table if I moved the table" correctly because its text-base world model could never intuit physics, or that it could never do math or code accurately.

When I say there is some issue with people claiming there is some fundamental limit on the capacities of LLM's, I don't mean to say "If you think that they don't have unlimited potential you are wrong", I mean "you can't use the architecture of the transformer to make a sweeping declaration of things LLM's can or cannot do without empirical evidence, because the empirical evidence has unearthed far more surprising revelations than a reductive theory has been able to"