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Cherny: Next-Token Prediction Forces AI Models to Plan Ahead

Boris Cherny · Claude Code Head Boris Cherny: Insane Growth, Tokenmaxxing, AI Agents' Next Frontier · May 20, 2026 · at 54:20

Boris Cherny, Head of Claude Code at Anthropic, addresses Yann LeCun's critique that LLMs lack world models by arguing next-token prediction induces emergent reasoning.

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“It's crazy, like, you teach this thing to predict the next word, and somehow, if the next word is hard enough, it has to learn to really plan ahead, and it has to learn how to do all of this.”

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Disclosure
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