The evidence the author offers that Markov chains are as effective as RNNs is that if you&#x27;re given a tiny snippet of the output of each it can be hard to tell which is which.<p>But the thing that (both in theory and in practice) distinguishes RNNs from simpler constructs with very finite amounts of state is precisely what happens with not-so-tiny amounts of output. RNNs can produce sizable syntactically valid chunks of languages with &quot;nested&quot; structure -- open and close tags in XML, parentheses in Lisp, curly braces in C, etc.; Markov chains can&#x27;t. It seems reasonable to guess that RNNs will also be able to produce better-structured natural language text than Markov chains ever will.<p>Show us a <i>page</i> of fake Shakespeare from the RNN and a page from the Markov chain, and I don&#x27;t think it will be so difficult to tell which is which.