LLMs: Why does in-context learning work? What exactly is happening from a technical perspective?

Everywhere I look for the answer to this question, the responses do little more than anthropomorphize the model. They invariably make claims like:

> *Without examples, the model must infer context and rely on its knowledge to deduce what is expected. This could lead to misunderstandings.*

> *One-shot prompting reduces this cognitive load by offering a specific example, helping to anchor the model's interpretation and focus on a narrower task with clearer expectations.*

> *The example serves as a reference …

context datascience examples in-context learning knowledge llms look perspective question responses technical work