The answer is yes and no. First, it will produce an output for any input. What you really mean is answer a query correctly.
It goes about doing that the same way it works in general which is memorizing sequences that are similar and outputting the corresponding sequence that follows. For example, if the training data has something like "These are the countries that have over a million people: <countries>" I would not be surprised if it returned <countries> for your query. However, if your query was "less than a million" I would be very surprised if it would return the other countries.
If you only give it "Here are the countries whose population exceeds 1 million:" the model has a chance to go on a tangent / inconsistently structured output / inconsistent values in output (examples when generating at temp=0.7: https://gist.github.com/minimaxir/86e09253f9e05058eb1e96de2b... )
If you give it the same prompt with a doubleline break and a "1.", it behaves much better.
