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umanwizardtoday at 7:00 PM1 replyview on HN

What does "predicting the next token" mean? I ask this every time people say "LLMs are just predicting the next token" and it's maddening that nobody can give a straight answer. Predicting it according to what probability distribution? Every process that produces a sequence of actions (including e.g. a human writing) can be modeled by some probability distribution and therefore their actions are indistinguishable from "predicting the next token" emitted by that distribution.


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the8472today at 8:21 PM

Yeah that's pretty much what gwern argues here[0]. Or to adapt another proverb: to predict the next token you first need to model the universe.

[0] https://gwern.net/scaling-hypothesis#gwern-difference--effic...

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