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Comment by eru

5 days ago

No. That's wrong. LLMs don't output the highest probability taken: they do a random sampling.

This was obviously a simplification which holds for zero temperature. Obviously top-p-sampling will add some randomness but the probability of unexpected longer sequences goes asymptotically to zero pretty quickly.

  • I'm not sure what the point is?

    A bog standard random number generator or even a flipping coin can produce novel output at will. That's a weird thing to fault LLMs for? Novelty is easy!

    See also how genetic algorithms and re-inforcement learning constantly solve problems in novel and unexpected ways. Compare also antibiotics resistances in the real world.

    You don't need smarts for novelty.

    Where I see the problem is producing output that's both high quality _and_ novel. On command to solve the user's problem.