Comment by frabcus
8 hours ago
It's a very unintuitive algorithm, and is pretty clever.
I recommend reading up on it: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08025-4
But no, it only ever picks tokens that are in the probability distribution of the last layer, and it might have picked anyway.
What if the next token represents a wrong or low-quality answer, but would have only been picked 10% of the time, but now it's picked 20% of the time? Doesn't that obviously decrease the model quality, even though "it might have picked that token anyway"?
It would be picked 10% of the time with watermarking.
The randomness properties of the PRNG will be very similar to other random number generators, it is just chosen to be vulnerable to a particular cryptanalytic attack (that requires a private key known only to anthropic). I think of it like the Dual_EC_DRGB generator rather than a biased coin.