Predicting the next word in context led to Open AI losing control of one of its research clusters. I’m not sure what “just” is doing in that sentence; most of my regression analyses don’t do that.
Reinforcement learning makes it something different. It becomes much more of a search engine through next-token-space that targets the training objective. Better to think about it like that, and then you'll see why "these things have motive" is not a terrible analogy, and you'll better be able to anticipate what they do.
You can't talk like these things have motive. They're just predicting the next word in the context. Stop anthopomorphizing them.