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I Asked AI to Count My Carbs 27,000 Times. It Couldn’t Give Me the Same Answer Twice.
(www.diabettech.com)
this post was submitted on 01 May 2026
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Technology
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It doesn't understand anything though? It never will. It's a probability machine. If you choose to believe its output, that's on you. I use it as a coding assistant to get boring things done faster. Fire a prompt at claude code, grab a coffee, check out the diff. But that last step is crucial. Can't trust AI output blindly.
The embedding layer post tokenization is not just a probability machine the way you're suggesting it. You can argue that it is probabilistic with inferred sentiment, but too many people think it works like how text prediction on your phone does and that is just factually inaccurate.
Verify output of course, but saying "it doesn't understand anything" and "probability machine" is a borderline erroneous short sell. At the level of tokens it "understands" relationships, and those relationships are not probabilistic, though they are fundamentally approximated based on a training corpus.
Can you explain how it's more than probability? It's using a neural network to guess the most likely next token, isn't it?
You could also say that it chooses what will be the next word it will say to you. It has a few words to choose from, which it has selected in relation to the previously spoken words, your question and previous interactions (the context). The probability you're talking about (a number) could also be seen as it's preference among those words. I'm not sure the probability vocabulary/analogy is necessarily the best one. The best might be to not employ any analogy at all, but then you have to dig deeper into the subject to form yourself an informed opinion. This series of videos explains it better than I do : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk&list=PLZHQObOWTQDNU6R1_67000Dx_ZCJB-3pi
The fact that it uses a non-trivial neural network. If it was simply a rate count of based on a corpus of how much time each word is followed by each it wouldn't be stronger than keyboard word predictions. To make accurate suggestions requires emergence of primitive reasoning on the semantics of the tokens, LLM neural networks (transformers) can be analyzed to find subnetworks dedicated to modeling reality. It is still probability, but saying it's just probability is not faithful
It's still just predicting the next token, it's just using more past data points than your keyboard. The rest of the phenomena are emergent from that. I think it's important to keep that in mind given how much they can imitate human reasoning.
If you recognize there's emergence, the "it's just probability" take is misleading