It’s sort of surprising—but true—that you can do no more than set up this kind of prediction objective, make it the job of every word’s word vectors to be such that they’re good at predicting the words that appear in their context or vice-versa—you just have that very simple goal—and you say nothing else about how this is going to be achieved—but you just pray and depend on the magic of deep learning. . . . And this miracle happens. And out come these word vectors that are just amazingly powerful at representing the meaning of words and are useful for all sorts of things

Brian Christian, The Alignment Problem, loc. 67969