I think the task of predicting the next word can be misunderstood. The better you want to be the more you have to "understand" how the previous words interacted. From the style of writing to the current topic discussed, the task gets increasingly complex if you want to be really, really good. How could the next sentence start? Will the author end the sentence here or keep going? These questions are very complex.

This does not mean that we humans might predict all the time, in fact I would argue that LLMs only predict during training. They generate otherwise. We might also learn by trying to predict. I can imagine babies doing it.